Racing lifer taking the reins at track
Cady, Valiquette headline changes in day-to-day operations at Fort Erie
“I haven’t really had much in the way of time in the summer to do anything for quite some time. I’m looking forward to having a couple of times where I don’t actually have to be there for every live race day.”
TOM VALIQUETTE
CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER AT FORT ERIE RACE TRACK
Tom Valiquette can switch to a smaller hat rack in his office at Fort Erie Race Track.
After five years as chief operating officer as well as chief financial officer, his original position, the first employee hired by Fort Erie Life Racing Consortium (FELRC) is “slowing down” and taking a “step back.”
Valiquette’s future at the thoroughbred track essentially will be a return to his past.
Sixty-one years old and a certified public accountant by trade, he will continue as chief financial officer.
Property services manager Andrew Cady is taking over oversight of all racing and mutuel operations in the newly created role of general manager.
Valiquette expects a seamless transition.
“Drew has been doing a fantastic job in most of the operational roles and, quite frankly, I’m in a position where I would like to slow down a bit,” he said. “Everything seemed to be logical for this.
“We’ve been working very closely for a while.”
Valiquette, who has more than 40 years of experience in the horse-racing industry, stopped short of calling the move a first step toward retirement.
“It’s sort of a step back, that’s exactly what it is. It’s not a retirement, but it’s slowing down,” he said in an interview from Mississauga, where he is working from home during the provincewide COVID-19 state of emergency.
Valiquette was responsible for helping build the team that would operate the track on a day-to-day basis when he was hired by the consortium as CFO in 2009.
“When I first started with Fort Erie, that’s the role I came in at,” he said. “I’m really going back to where I was, essentially.”
He added the duties of overseeing operations in July 2015 following the retirement of Rick Cowan, the former CFO.
The pressure of wearing both hats and doing each job well, while always challenging, decreased following elimination of slot machines from the track and a reduction in race dates a few years ago.
“While there was still a fair amount to do, there was less than at the beginning. At that point in time, I had a good, strong team behind me in operations and the financial end,” Valiquette recalled.
“And I was able to do both. I had great support.”
At a race track, a race day is never a day off for the head of operations, he said, speaking from years of experience.
“I haven’t really had much in the way of time in the summer to do anything for quite some time,” Valiquette said. “I’m looking forward to having a couple of times where I don’t actually have to be there for every live race day.”
Jim Thibert, the consortium’s chief executive, said in a news release announcing the changes in the track’s upper management “it would be hard to overestimate the critical role Tom has played at FELRC since 2009.”
“Along with our board of directors, throughout the past 11 years, we have been through many serious challenges and many ups and downs,” Thibert said. “Now that Tom is reducing his workload, he remains a strong and essential member of my senior management team.”
The consortium, he added, is confident Cady’s knowledge and decades of experience in the industry “will allow him to successfully lead our racing operations at Fort Erie.”
Cady — a thoroughbred racing lifer if there ever was one — began working along the Fort Erie backstretch in 1977, assisting his father, who was a trainer at the time.
In 1993, he started working with Nick Gonzalez at the trainer’s barn in Fort Erie during the summer and at Gulfstream Park and Tampa Bay Downs in Florida during the winter months.
“I was basically here as soon as I got out of school. It’s been my life,” the 54-year-old Fort Erie resident said. “I got out of school, followed my dad’s footsteps but just in a different way.
“He trained horses, and I went to the other side of it.”
Early in his career, Cady spent mornings working for different trainers, “usually for my father.”
He began working on the starting gate in 1987 at Fort Erie, eventually becoming the gate starter.
As manager of property services, Cady was responsible for overseeing maintenance of the dirt and turf courses. He kept in contact with racing secretary Jackie Elder to decide how many races would be running on each surface.
“Sometimes, when it looks like it is going to be more wet, we can maybe run only two days on the grass,” he said. “We try to run two, three turf races a day.”
Cady will continue working with Elder in setting up the race cards that again this year will be running primarily Monday and Tuesday afternoons and occasionally on Sunday.
“Usually, we try to run eight a day. Some days, we can only fill six,” Cady said. “On bigger days, we try to do nine or 10.
“We work as a team.”
In his new position, he will manage a track heading into year two of a pandemic.
“Things ran pretty smooth here last year. We were pretty safe, but we want to have our fans back,” he said. “That’s the biggest thing, right?
“You want to have the yelling and screaming and the excitement.”
Racing without spectators was “not the same” for this race-track lifer.
“It was pretty eerie watching 18 people screaming and yelling instead of a couple of thousand,” he recalled with a chuckle. “We’d love to get our fans back.”
A man who’s been around horses most of his life doesn’t know for sure if the animals know whether the stands are full when they race. He suspects they do.
“That’s a good question,” Cady said with a laugh.
“But I’ve heard a lot of horses, when they go to the bigger tracks, people put cotton in their ears because they think they hear the crowd and become more focused on the crowd than what they’re supposed to be doing.”
The track has been approved for 40 race days in 2021, the same as last year, and opening day for the 124th season is tentatively set for Tuesday, June 1.
As was the case last year, the Prince of Wales Stakes — the track’s signature event and the second jewel in Canadian thoroughbred racing’s Triple Crown — will be delayed. It will run about three weeks after the Queen’s Plate, set for Sunday, Aug. 22, at Woodbine in Toronto.