Outstanding Trainer: Mark Casse

In March, Mark Casse’ father and mentor, Norman Casse, died at age 79. About a month later, the announcement that Mark will be inducted into the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame came the same week Mark won his fifth straight Sovereign Award as Canada’s Outstanding Trainer, an honour he’s received eight times in his career.

Mark also had a stake in the nation’s Horse of the Year for the second straight year. Breeders’ Cup winner Catch a Glimpse won this year’s top horse title (along with the awards for Champion Two-Year-Old Female and Champion Turf Female). In 2014, Mark’s trainee Lexie Lou won the Queen’s Plate en route to Horse of the Year honours.

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Mark has now trained four Canadian Horse of the Year honourees. He also conditioned 2012 winner Uncaptured and 2007’s Sealy Hill.

Despite winning 10 Woodbine training titles, including the last night straight, Mark’s first Queen’s Plate winner is Lexie Lou. Catch a Glimpse is the trainer’s first Breeders’ Cup champ, breaking a 0-for-25 Cup drought.

“Watch out we’re just getting started now,” Mark said at the press conference after Catch a Glimpse won the Juvenile Fillies Turf and his trainee Tepin won the Breeders’ Cup Mile en route to Mark’s first Eclipse award.

“This game is about dreams,” Mark said at the post-race Breeders’ Cup press conference. “When you a buy a horse, the dream is always the Breeders’ Cup, the Kentucky Derby, those kinds of races.”

The trainer said Catch a Glimpse’s victory in the Natalma Stakes at Woodbine gave him the confidence to try her in the Breeders’ Cup.

“I wanted her to show me she was that good,” he said.

The 2015 campaign was arguably Mark’s best in the business. He set personal bests for wins (159) and earnings $13.7 million, ranked fourth among all North American trainers and surpassed $100 million in lifetime earnings (now sitting at over $109 million).

But the year wasn’t all glory for the 55-year-old from Ocala, FL

Apart from losing his father, one of Mark’s top assistants and two of the trainer’s top horses have died in the last couple years.

In October of 2014, Mark lost his close friend Mike Anderson who worked at Mark’s Moonshadow Farm in Ocala. Often Mark’s sharpest critic, the man nicknamed “Grumpy” had worked for Mark for 35 years, ever since the trainer began conditioning horses at age 18.

Then, shortly before the 2014 Sovereign Awards banquet at Woodbine in April of 2015, Conquest Two Step, the winner of the Palos Verdes Stakes (Grade 2) Jan. 31 at Santa Anita, was euthanized after complications from surgery to repair a broken bone in his left hind leg. At the time, Mark called Conquest Two Step one of the best horses he’s ever trained.

On June 14, 2015 at Woodbine, disaster struck again. Danzig Moon, the horse that was fifth in last year’s Kentucky Derby and was an early favourite to deliver Mark’s second straight Queen’s Plate, broke his right hind leg during the Plate Trial and was euthanized on the track.

But nothing helps the healing process more than a berth in the Hall of Fame, an eighth Sovereign Award as Outstanding Trainer, a first Eclipse Award and your first two Breeders’ Cup victories.