The snow and ice crunched under the feet of Susan Rasmussen as she presented some of her horses to a visiting photographer. The weather in southern Ontario early in 2014 is merciless: strong winds and bitterly cold temperatures are the norm every day, but the Toronto-born horse owner and breeder is tough as nails.
“We lost power for six days,” says Rasmussen about the ice storm that hit Caledon, ON, during the 2014 holiday season. “We were using the tractor and the “Gator” to haul water from the neighbour’s house for the horses.”
Indeed, it is not unusual for Rasmussen to foal a mare by the headlights of her car when the power goes out.
There are some 60 equines on Rasmussen’s Openwood Stable that she has owned with her husband Harvey since 1978. They include a few of her own mares, yearlings and horses of racing age, plus foxhunters and retired racehorses.
Rasmussen is not adverse to tough situations: it has been only three years since a horrendous fire claimed the life of nine horses and burned a barn and a workshop to the ground.
And while the weather may be frightful early in 2014 – and her long list of duties now include staying up all night to foal-watch – Rasmussen is still having fun, thanks in large part to a filly named Friday.
Hobnobsnob, nicknamed “Friday,” provided Rasmussen with her first ever stakes win when the homebred daughter of Mobil led all the way to take the Victoriana Stakes last summer on the Woodbine turf course. “You could have heard me screaming for her from far away.”
Horses have been a part of Rasmussen’s life for as long as she can remember. On her family’s country home, near the farm she has now, she recalls her father having riding horses.
“My father would go out riding and I was in my baby carriage and started carrying on, so my Mom put me on a horse,” says Rasmussen.
She began showing horses, hunters and jumpers at the age of 14 and was introduced to the sport of foxhunting, something she still does today as an “over 65-year-old.”
Rasmussen pursued a career as a schoolteacher so that she could spend her summers with horses but that calling lasted just four years.
Instead, she set up a teaching business at her family’s farm, teaching hunters and jumpers and riding thoroughbreds getting ready for the racetrack.
When she met Harvey and bought Openwood, she had her own foxhunting horses and was taking in standardbred boarders.
“I have always been in the midwife business,”notes Rasmussen. “I would bring mares in for clients, foal them and then they would go back to their owners.”
Rasmussen says she gradually progressed into having thoroughbreds but it was more like it was dropped at her doorstep in the form of a grey mare.
“Pirate Brat was left with me in lieu of an unpaid board bill, so I bred her,” recalls Rasmussen.
The mare’s 1986 filly foal, Silver Gum, a daughter of Saunders, would have a profound effect on Rasmussen.
“She was my first racehorse, and Sue Leslie was training for me,” says Rasmussen. “The day she was making her debut, Sue called me and told me to not expect much. It was cold and rainy, the track was bad and her post was bad. Harvey gave me $100 to bet to win on her. The only thing I told our jockey Rob Landry was, ‘don’t get my new silks dirty.”
On that dreary October afternoon, Silver Gum and Landry popped out of the gate and led the field on a merry chase, winning at 16 to 1.
“I remember I practically had to be carried down to the winner’s circle,” laughs Rasmussen. “How could you not be hooked after something like that?”
Pirate Brat produced eight more winners for Rasmussen, including $200,000 earners Herluf and Swinton.
The next generation of Pirate Brat foals has given Rasmussen even more thrills.
Dancing Leaves, a Kiridashi offspring, won over $170,000 on the track for Rasmussen and when she was claimed for $20,000 from her owner in 2007, Rasmussen quickly claimed her right back and retired her.
Now Dancing Leaves is part of her small broodmare band with Hobnobsnob being her first foal and Pugsley her second.
“Hobnobsnob is not a very big filly, she’s only 15.1,” offers Rasmussen. “She doesn’t have turf feet, in fact she has a club foot. But she really matured in 2013 and started eating really well.”
Earl Barnett, whom Rasmussen has known since she was a teenager, trains her small stable. The team is looking forward to the debut of French Romance in 2014, a Giant Gizmo filly out of Dancing Leaves. The mare has a yearling by former Ontario sire Wilko and is in foal to that sire for 2014.
Openwood runners have earned nearly $900,000 in the last nine years and her stable rarely gets bigger than two horses.
So what is the secret to this high percentage of success achieved by Rasmussen’s horses?
“I train my horses like they are foxhunters,” acknowledges Rasmussen, who is in her 52nd year of foxhunting at the Eglington and Caledon Hunt Clubs. “I ride them around the nearby conservation area every day. They see trucks and traffic. They see everything. It prepares them well for the track.”
Starting again
The three-year anniversary of the barn fire was in January 2014 and thoughts of that day still haunt Rasmussen.
“We have no idea what happened,” says Rasmussen. “I was in the house watching a mare and one of my work girls was watering off. She was at the main barn when the fire started [in the top barn]. It was too late for us to do anything.”
No cause of the fire was ever determined. The Rasmussens were also left “without a hammer or a nail, so many things we took for granted.” But they did not rebuild the destroyed barn. “You just can’t describe such a thing.”
Openwood is back at full capacity again and is also now a foster farm for LongRun Thoroughbred Retirement Society, a rehab-relocation program for retired racehorses based out of Woodbine Racetrack.
She has three horses for LongRun at her farm, including Big Red Mike, the Queen’s Plate winner in 2010. Owned and bred by Terra Farms, Big Red Mike had a reputation of being a feisty handful on the track and when he was retired from racing it was thought the gelding was going to be too tough to be re-trained as a riding horse.
But after nine months with Rasmussen, “Mike” is set to be adopted out. “He follows you around like a puppy dog. I am going to miss him.”
Rasmussen is with her horses each day from early in the morning until night check at 10 p.m. She does a lot of the barn work and also does her own shipping to farms and the track. Her staff of five helps with the barn and horse chores.
“I really don’t need a lot of sleep,” admits Rasmussen. “Horses come naturally to me and they always come first.”
