Premier inspires name change

Horse owners rename recently purchased filly ‘Stay The Blazes Home’

NORTH SYDNEY — Of course, there was going to be a horse.

With Nova Scotia Premier Stephen Mcneil’s recently-coined "stay the blazes home" becoming synonymous with COVID-19 social distancing measures, it was only a matter of time before the phrase would serve as inspiration for a name.

After all, the now popular and oft-repeated utterance has already inspired poems, songs, beers, T-shirts, coffee mugs, artwork, shower curtain prints and online memes. And now “Stay The Blazes Home” is the name of a Cape Breton horse.

New Waterford’s Randy Getto, his sister and a family friend purchased the then one-year-old filly at a Prince Edward Island horse auction last October. They went looking to buy a young horse with racing potential that they could afford and walked away with a fine specimen called “Goddards Gigolo," a name that none of the new owners were particularly wild about.

“They all have names when you buy them and they’re usually named after their mother or father or the farm where they came from, but we really weren’t liking the name she came with,” admitted Getto, who works as a nurse.

“With COVID going on we were all hearing the premier talk about staying the blazes home and since we have lots of connections to health care we kind of liked what Stephen Mcneil said and thought that would be a good name so we renamed her.”

But it turns out that in giving their young horse a new name they were tempting some long-held horse racing community superstitions.

“Well, it’s always been considered bad luck to tell stories or take pictures of a horse that has never raced, but we’ve followed that before with other horses and they didn’t work out anyway – we have nothing to lose,” he laughed.

It’s also considered bad luck to rename a horse, but that still wasn’t enough to deter Getto and company from giving the newest addition to their stable a new name.

In fact, he reckons “Stay The Blazes Home” may have been worth the purchase price just for the smiles and chuckles the filly is likely to get when, or if, she makes the racing circuit.

For now, the two-yearold is staying “at home” in a Northside Downs stable where she is being trained as a potential Atlantic Sire Stakes contender.

DAVID JALA/CAPE BRETON POST Meet “Stay The Blazes Home,” a locally-owned two-year-old filly who was renamed after Premier Stephen Mcneil’s now viral expression imploring Nova Scotia residents to flatten the curve of the coronavirus by avoiding other people.