Hold on a minute, I’m just checking on a mare that’s about ready to foal,” shouts Bernard McCormack over the phone from the gorgeous property that is Mapleshade Farm stretching over 100 acres in Janetville, ON.
The brogue is strong from the 56-year-old Irishman, born in County Dublin, despite having lived in North America for the better part of 37 years. Ever one to take on a challenge, McCormack is in the midst of trying to trick Mother Nature and put one over on a mare threatening to bring life into the world, in the middle of a chilly winter, at some ungodly hour later this evening.
“If you don’t want them foaling at one in the morning, sometimes you can bring them in early and hopefully they’ll settle and foal at seven tonight instead,” he said. “That’s the theory anyway… but, as you know, horses have their own plans and we’re just along for the ride.”
McCormack oversees Cara Bloodstock, a full service bloodstock sales agency along with a number of his own broodmares, in partnership with his wife, Karen, from their Mapleshade Farm.
Cara, an Irish word meaning ‘friend,’ is well suited to McCormack who readily engages conversation and is well known in the industry as a prominent trader of horses dating well back to his time as general manager at Windfields Farm.
Truth be told, the Irishman should probably be speaking with a Canadian accent. His late father, Tom, who wrote for the Irish Thoroughbred, at one point had visions of coming to Canada.
“Way back when I was just an infant, my dad was offered a job as the Racing Form correspondent in Toronto, but he couldn’t come as my mum was pregnant,” said McCormack.
As a teenager, not long graduated from the Irish National Stud program, McCormack had another vision into his future while sitting and waiting, just as he is now some four decades later, for a mare to foal.
“I remember picking up a magazine with a picture of Northern Dancer on the cover being shod. This horse had such a fierce look about him,” recalled McCormack of Canada’s pride and joy, and the sire of the brilliant U.K. Triple Crown champ Nijinsky.
“I’d seen Nijinsky run at the Curragh in his two-year-old year and followed him throughout his Triple Crown run,” said McCormack. “Nijinsky was the first Triple Crown winner since the ‘30s. It was a huge story. The article went on to speak about E.P. Taylor and the farm and it caught my attention.”
Most Talked About Man In Town
It’s fitting that a bloodstock agent and horseman of McCormack’s ilk would come to horse racing through family.
“My grandfather raced horses and my dad had multiple jobs,” started McCormack. “My dad trained horses and also ran a pub and a grocery. At one point he was the guy in the town you went to for a bet, for your war rations and, next to the parish priest, he was the most talked about man in town.”
Despite the connection, McCormack did not grow up around horses and spent his time studying pedigrees and obsessing over horses as a youth growing up in Balbriggan in the suburbs of Dublin.
He did get to the races often and his father raced a very good horse named Columbanus, by So Blessed, that won the Tetrarch Stakes at the Curragh and finished third in the Irish 2000 Guineas.
Coming from a big Irish family, necessity dictated that McCormack find a way to spend time near the horses he loved.
“I was the eldest of eight. My poor mother had eight of us in 10 years, no twins. It was ‘move over, the next one needs attention,’ so I took off when I was 18 and did the National Stud course with Dr. Michael Osborne at the Irish National Stud,” said McCormack.
The program propelled McCormack through learning experiences at smaller farms in Ireland before a stint at Airlie Stud where he learned how to foal and eventually prep yearlings.
Keen to make his own name in the game, opportunity arose for McCormack late in the 1970s.
“A job came up at Walmac Farm in Kentucky,” McCormack said. “Alleged had just arrived at Walmac from after winning his second Arc de Triomphe. Not long after, I landed in Lexington and began looking after stallions.”
The life in Canada, foreshadowed early and often in McCormack’s life, came to fruition soon after. In 1979, he snapped up an opportunity to work for Windfields in Maryland prepping Northern Dancer yearlings.
“It was a very exciting time for me, knowing pedigrees and what Northern Dancer meant to the world,” said McCormack.
In 1981, McCormack moved to Canada completing the journey his father was unable to make many moons earlier.
“In 1987, I became the general manager at Windfields, at 27 years of age, which is very young. It was a huge honour, and it became my career,” said McCormack. “I met my wife Karen here in Ontario and we were married in 1997. We had two children, Clare and Connor, and raised our family at Windfields through all the ups and downs including the dispersal in 1996 and the rebirth of the farm for a good run as a commercial operation.”
As final plans were being made to close Windfields, Bernard and Karen had purchased a farm, Mapleshade, with the notion that when the final chapter came to a close, they would have their own place to raise horses.
Birth of Cara
After working for the greatest breeding operation in Canadian history and fulfilling a lifelong dream, McCormack was suddenly presented with a chance at some down time, but he wasn’t quite ready for retirement.
“Today is the anniversary of the day my wife and I bought our farm back in 2004,” noted McCormack.” But, we started a lot earlier than that. We got going with a couple of mares in 1996 and that was a few years before the slots came in at Woodbine.
“I’ll always be grateful to Windfields for allowing me to have a few irons in the fire to get a foothold in the business. I had some early success. Of course, in this business you can have early success and it lets you think you know what you’re doing… but it gave us a start.”
From a few fledgling mares, the McCormack operation grew. The first homebred yearlings sold under the Cara Bloodstock banner in 1997. By the fall of 2008, Cara Bloodstock expanded to include Bernard and Karen’s clients in the launching of a full service bloodstock sales agency.
Not long after going out on his own, McCormack made waves by topping the second-day session of the 2009 Keeneland January mixed sale, selling Vestrey Lady, a stakes-winning mare for Harlequin Ranches, for $300,000.
This past August, at the Fasig-Tipton Select Sale in Saratoga, McCormack sold a filly by Speightstown for $425,000 and a colt from the last crop of Unbridled’s Song for $220,000.
“I’m very happy to say that last year we sold 40 yearlings for nearly $3.2 million (Cdn) including our first yearlings at Saratoga for one of our main clients Jay and Christine Hayden,” said McCormack. “It was a touching point because I remember going to those Saratoga sales with Windfields in the days of Nijinsky and Northern Dancer.”
The Cara group is easy to spot at the sales with the team all outfitted in khakis with black and orange golf shirts and black cap. The farm employs a dozen or so temporary workers at the sale, many of them repeating year after year, to bring cohesion and consistency as they show their horses.
In 2011, Pachattack, who finished third in the Grade 1 Breeders’ Cup Ladies’ Classic, brought a hefty $1.2 million in the Fasig-Tipton November select mixed sale, in Lexington, under McCormack’s watchful eye.
McCormack notes that a good sales agent has to wear many hats, first and foremost of which is to be known.
“In my Windfields days, Windfields operated a sales agency which primarily I was the face of going back to the ‘80s,” said McCormack. “You get to know the buyers and they get to know you and you have a rapport.
“But the one main thing you trade on as a sales agent is your integrity. And to represent the horses correctly to the buyers and to deal honestly with buyers and breeders, prior to them getting to the sale. If you’ve been at it long enough, with successful horses as a backdrop, it’s something you can trade on. That’s part of where the agency comes from. Dollars have gone up each of the last three years.”
And as the agency grows, McCormack is realizing that sometimes less is more.
“In the early days I took a lot of horses, 75 to 85 horses, and what I found in that is they can’t all be good,” he said. “When you have that number, you end up spending so much time trying to trade all the horses that you don’t have the time to trade the horses that are actually going to pay for the ones that aren’t going to be a profit.”
As the agency looks for quality, so too does the McCormack clan breeding stock.
“Consciously, a few years ago, my wife and I decided to try and improve what we owned, which is really the calling of all of us that are breeding horses,” said McCormack. “Just trying to improve the stock and not demand it of others if we didn’t demand it of ourselves. Over the past five years we’ve probably turned over our broodmare band 100 per cent and invested in U.S sired mares from good families like Street Sense, Pulpit and Smart Strike.”
By improving their stock, McCormack has enjoyed seeing opportunities beyond the September sale at Woodbine.
“We maintain a private farm, essentially breeding for the market with 10 mares. To this point, we’ve sold almost 100 per cent at the Canadian sale but I can see in the future where we’ll sell a few more down south,” said McCormack.
It’s a job that McCormack enjoys and he rolls with the punches while dealing with the ups and downs of raising horses in a volatile market.
“I always say that being a commercial breeder and selling horses, it’s a year planning the mating, a year-and-a-half raising them and two minutes of terror when you sell them,” he said, laughing.
Thoughts on Ontario
As a member of the board of the CTHS and a major stakeholder in the industry, it would be wrong not to engage McCormack about the current state of racing in Ontario.
“We’ve gone through more turmoil than most industries could survive,” said McCormack. “Breeding is a five-year cycle from start of investment. Business thrives on confidence and that has been lacking lately. Some of it out of our control and some with how the industry functions locally where we try and deal with government and try to survive. We’ve all gone through a shock and now we’re looking at how the funding model is going to work.”
It’s no surprise that a man who studies pedigrees believes that improving his own stock is the way to move forward.
“As a breeder, we’re gambling all the time. Like every gambler you have to handicap and make choices,” said McCormack. “For Karen and I, the goal is to get good quality mares and compete. How do you do that? First, you have to identify your competition. Often, you’re competing against yourself in terms of what you can afford.
“At the end of the day, for Karen and I, it’s to try and own and breed the best horses possible. To be able to breed quality Canadian-breds that are good enough to sell in bigger markets, not just our local market. I’ve only recently been able to say I’ve had horses that fit that requirement, but that is the goal.”
To that end, McCormack sold a weanling in November to the Zayat family, the owners of U.S. Triple Crown champion American Pharoah, and another to prominent owner Ken and Sarah Ramsey.
“Those are signs our horses are able to sell in other markets,” he said. “As a breeder, I’d love to breed a Canadian-bred that’s good enough to break its maiden at Saratoga and go on and compete in a group race. In order to do that, you have to take on the Kentucky breeders and I know it’s not easy to do.”
But McCormack is following through on his plan, having improved his broodmare band, and continues working towards building a better racehorse.
“You pay your stud fees and you keep investing,” he stated. “Being a Canadian-bred, an Ontario-bred, there is a great three-year-old program for the filly and colt classics in Canada and it is an opportunity to get a return on investment and gives you an edge.”
He advises though that some diversity in stock is beneficial in the long run.
“The restricted racing we have will help your owner make money, but adding value to the broodmare and value to the horse is important,” said McCormack. “The multiplier out on the value to the (restricted) horse is low. Fillies that win just restricted races are worth ten percent of earnings in international market.
“The payoff is low even if you’re successful in a regional program, so you have to look and think what’s the payoff with a horse that is successful at Gulfstream or Saratoga. That return is better for the mare and all the way around.”
For now, McCormack is keen to keep working away at Mapleshade and take joy from the hard work he shares with his wife, Karen. Though early days yet, he’s hopeful that a young colt born on their farm, Sir Duddley Digges, might provide a thrill in this year’s Queen’s Plate.
“He’s by Gio Ponti out of the Kris S mare My Pal Lana. We sold that colt as a weanling at Keeneland in November and we got $70,000 for him. The people that bought him were the people that owned Gio Ponti, Castelton Lyons,” recalled McCormack. “They raised him at their place and sold him at the OBS two-year-old in-training sale to Ken and Sarah Ramsey.”
It wasn’t long ago that one of McCormack’s agency horses, We Miss Artie, was sold to the Ramseys and went on to win a Grade 1 before finishing fourth in the 2014 Queen’s Plate.
“I’d like nothing more than to end up one day breeding a horse that could win the Queen’s Plate.”
In hindsight, it seems incredible that a young kid from the small town of Balbriggan, in the northern part of Fingal, Ireland, flipping through a magazine one lonely night in a foaling barn, might have weaved his way into the fabric of Canadian racing.
“It’s been a dream come true. We’re mom and pop, I’m proud to say that, and we’re happy to live with our horses,” he said.
