Each year, Frank Stronach’s Adena Springs breeding operation produces dozens of well-bred thoroughbreds with the hope that they will one day compete at the highest level. Many of these horses will be sold as yearlings; some are kept by Stronach to race in his famous black, red and gold silks; and there will be a few horses that just don’t make it to the track. With nearly 30,000 thoroughbreds registered with the Jockey Club each year across North America, the burden of caring for these horses when their racing career is over is a huge issue for the racing industry. In 2004, Stronach chose to take responsibility for his charges and launched the Adena Springs Retirement Program.
“Frank has always been pretty much on the forefront. We were the first in-house retirement program,” says Stacie Clark Rogers, who oversees the program from Adena Springs North in Aurora, Ontario. “Seven years ago we had about 60 retirees in a paddock in Florida and we started bringing them up here and came up with a plan through trial and error. The horses needed to be re-trained and re-schooled before you could resell them.”
The horses in the program are a mixture of stakes winners, battle-tested geldings and well-bred types that didn’t do enough to make it as a stallion or broodmare. With an eye to protecting their Adena progeny, the Stronachs set up two facilities, one in Florida and another in Ontario, to help retrain and re-purpose their retired horses for a new career.