“I cannot remember not loving horses,” said Marguerite Old, a registered equine massage therapist who currently works out of Woodbine Racetrack. Growing up in Mississauga, there were few places for her to indulge in that love, but that didn’t stop her.
“I would ride any chance I got. My dad would take me out. I grew up north of Burnhamthorpe road – there was nothing when I grew up in the 1970s. There were a few farms out that way, and my father would have to take me out to a little farm and they would throw me on a little pony and he would lead me around. I was always so mad, because I wanted to ride the pony all on my own.”
Though horses have always been close to her heart, her first real taste of the horse racing industry came as a teenager, when her parents bought a cottage in Kincardine, ON. As luck, or maybe fate, would have it, their cottage backed onto a standardbred training track.
“I was at the end of the gate every morning watching these standardbreds train and it was like I had gone to heaven.”
Not surprisingly, she soon found herself within the midst of the daily grind.
“I started going over to the standardbred barn and lurking. I wasn’t the only kid that would do that, we would just hang around and they were pretty friendly towards us. But, I was the one who wouldn’t go away. So they would eventually give me odd jobs to do. Before I knew it, I kept going every year and they kept giving me more responsibility as I got older. Eventually, I would just show up every morning and I would help tack up standardbreds. I would help sweep, and I would groom.”
Unfortunately, her four-legged friends did not follow her to the city where she found herself going to school and where she eventually worked as an executive assistant at a multinational pharmaceutical company.
Old still knew she wanted to work with animals, even though she worked in the concrete jungle of the city and having no access to horses. What she didn’t know was that her career change would be triggered by the story of Brigadier, a fallen Toronto Police horse. “I was in my thirties and I had just gotten married and I was sitting at my boring desk job where I was doing quite well. There was a picture of him on the Toronto Star and I clicked on it because it was a horse. It brought me to a gallery of horses. There was a picture of a girl in scrubs petting this gorgeous warmblood horse and I clicked on it and it said, ‘so and so is an equine massage therapist’ and I was like ‘What? I can do that?!’”
Old researched schools and stumbled across the D’Arcy Lane Institute, which offers a comprehensive two-year equine massage therapy program in London, ON. Intrigued by the idea of a new career, she attended an information session with her husband Chris to learn more about it.
Even though it was a feasible career move, Old would be stepping into new territory and needed to be a real entrepreneur in the business. Her husband, understanding her love for horses, was quick to encourage her.
“He said, ‘Follow your bliss.’”
In 2007, she enrolled in D’al’s two-year program and the following year obtained a hot walker’s license at Woodbine Racetrack.
“I started as a hot walker in between first and second year of school because I knew I needed to get my hands-on horse experience and I was as green as grass,” recalled Old who first started working with Woodbine trainer John Leblanc Jr.
“He would give me horses to massage and I would massage them all for free and I would work all morning. I had bone spurs on my feet and I died that first summer. I worked so hard.”
Old officially launched her business Equine Edge Massage Therapy in 2010 after completing her schooling and obtaining an official designation as a REMT from the International Federation of Registered Equine Massage Therapists (IFREMT).
A steady portion of her work focuses on giving horses pre-race massages, somewhere between 72 and 48 hours leading up to their race day. Working on thoroughbreds over the years, she explained the important role massage therapy plays in helping racehorses throughout their careers.
“What you’re doing is keeping muscles in their prime state of relaxation and working out any adhesions that develop in the muscles due to training and any residual inflammation that is leftover from the training regime of any top athlete,” said Old who is also currently working towards a diploma in Equine Studies with the University of Guelph.
She has worked on a handful of notable horses including Inglorious, Goldstryke Glory, Nancy O, Amis Gizmo, Melmich – just to name a few.
Some of her current clients at Woodbine include trainers such as Josie Carroll, Kevin Attard and Katerina Esposito.
Although the majority of work remains at the track, Old recently has also travelled to work with her four-legged friends. Most notably, with Josie Carroll’s trainee Ami’s Mesa, who competed in the 2017 Grade 1 Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Sprint and posted an impressive runner-up finish to Bar of Gold.
Old takes pride in being part of those big race days with the horses she has worked on. More importantly though, after changing careers and almost a decade of working in the sport, she knows exactly where she is meant to be.
“Where I feel totally at peace, even apart from all of the excitement and just how thrilling it can be when horses run well, which is something that I never expected,” she said. “I knew it would be fun, but I had no idea it would be as phenomenal as it is to watch a horse that you’ve worked on and be part of it – is just being in the stall with them, that’s it.”
