THE RIDE OF HER LIFE
Laurie Gulas thought it was the Breeders’ Stakes. That was just the beginning
Laurie Gulas was about to hit bottom.
Years removed from her horse-racing highs, the former jockey was addicted to painkillers, running out of money to pay her bills and looking desperately for a way to turn things around. She’d take help from wherever it came, from a man in prison for dealing drugs, from another looking to buy them, if it could give her hope.
“I had the best of intentions and I took a chance,” she says, “and did it the wrong way.”
Gulas needed money. The one currency she had was the pills that were supposed be the answer in an ongoing battle to find relief from the numerous falls she had endured throughout her racing career.
And a friend, a man who had once sold her a car and whose dog she had adopted when he went to county jail, a man she had continued to talk to and had visited in prison, had an idea. He could hook her up with someone looking for prescription drugs.
It would be a one-time deal, the rider known as Longshot Laurie convinced herself. It would be the start of her road back. Laura Lynn Gulas was born in Welland, Ont., on Feb. 16, 1969, and knew as early as four years old she wanted to become a jockey, without knowing how that would be accomplished. She began working at Fort Erie Racetrack at the age of 15 as a stablehand for trainer Brian Dore and then moved to Toronto to enrol in an equine program.
She was four-foot-nine and weighed 99 pounds when she raced for the first time at Woodbine Racetrack as a 21-year-old. She was diminutive even by jockey standards. Gulas was one of only a handful of female riders and despite her small stature, she displayed both strength and savvy as she put her horses through their paces.
Still, she eased herself into the racing life, competing in just three races that year. She admits she was ill-prepared.
“There’s so much more that goes on than just the morning workouts; it blew me away,” she said. “I saw it in a different perspective. It was the actual art of race riding. It was the real deal. I didn’t push to continue riding because I knew I needed more experience.”
Gulas ramped up her schedule the following year, competing in 156 races and winning 11 of them. She also suffered her first major racing injury — a fractured pelvis — in one of many spills she would experience.
But she wasn’t attracting enough clientele and, with an abundance of apprentice riders also beginning their careers, she chose to move away from her home track and head to California, where some of her racing idols were riding. Among them was legendary Canadian Sandy Hawley, the first jockey to win 500 races in one year.
She returned to Woodbine in the winter of 1993 and over the next half-decade she established herself as one of the top 20 jockeys in Ontario, earning a reputation for her “daredevil” ways.
“She would ride anything,” says friend Lori McMahon, a Fort Erie Racetrack worker who leads the horses and their riders onto the track. “She would ride for a trainer who hadn’t won in years just because she loved to ride. No matter what the horse was or the odds, she’d give you 100 per cent. If you needed a rider in the jocks’ room, she was there.”
And that’s the situation veteran trainer Roger Attfield found himself in ahead of the Breeders’ Stakes in 1999. The horse racing hall-of-famer needed a rider for Free Vacation, a three-year-old filly that had shown promise but nothing to indicate she would be a factor in the last leg of the Canadian Triple Crown.
“When I tell you how many (pills) I could take in a day . . . you don’t want to know.” LAURIE GULAS
The morning-line oddsmaker agreed, handicapping Free Vacation as a 15-1 long shot.
With many of the top jockeys having already committed to other horses, Attfield booked Gulas. “Laurie had been riding one or two other horses for me and I thought she was a pretty good rider,” he says. “I had no problem putting her on the horse.”
Attfield advised Gulas to bide her time in the race and preserve the filly for a late run. The race didn’t get off to a good start.
“She kind of fussed in the gate and when it opened she lunged out and we got left a couple of lengths,” Gulas told the Star that day.
But Gulas settled the horse into stride and waited patiently as Attfield had instructed. At the top of the stretch, Gulas unleashed the filly and sprinted to a historic victory on the 11⁄ 2- mile long grass track, edging out John the Drummer by three-quarters of a length.
It marked the first time a female jockey had won a Canadian Triple Crown race in the 70-year history of the series. Longshot Laurie lived up to her nickname.
“It was a barrier breaker,” says Arthur Silvera, a trainer who also booked Gulas to ride some of his horses. “After all these years, a woman could step up and win one of these prestigious races for a (top) trainer that had enough confidence in her to put her aboard this horse. I think it was a reassurance that female riders can get it done as well.”
About three weeks after that victory, Gulas was competing at Woodbine when her horse clipped heels with another horse before the first turn and fell hard to the ground. The collision knocked Gulas unconscious and gave her a severe concussion.
“The first words out of the doctor’s mouth were, ‘I’m so sorry, you’ll never ride again.’ One day you could sneeze and you’ll be a vegetable,’ ” Gulas says. “I didn’t hear anything after that. The worst thing you can say to a rider is, ‘You’ll never ride again.’ All I did after that is set out to prove those words were wrong.”
Her attempt proved futile. She returned to riding and began experiencing headaches, finally shutting it down for the remainder of the season. It got worse the following February when she tried riding again and suffered a second concussion and severe neck trauma from the impact of a fall that occurred when the horse she was exercising had a heart attack and died.
Eight months after, with Gulas persistently complaining to doctors of pain, it was discovered one of her collarbones had broken, ripped off the chest wall and wedged against the main nerve of her spinal column. Surgery was needed to insert a metal plate and screws in her chest to mend her collarbone and fuse it back into place.
Healed and ready to ride again, Gulas returned to competition in 2001 and did well, winning 25 of the 281 races she entered and taking home more than $1 million in purses. In 2002, Longshot Laurie won 32 races in 358 starts and a career-best $1.3 million in earnings. Things were looking up. “I never had a doubt (about returning to ride again) because I was so determined and that’s all I ever worked for,” she says.
But in 2003, she began suffering excruciating pain in her bones when she rode. Doctors prescribed her medication. It didn’t help.
When the pain intensified she started self-medicating with opioids she bought off the streets — percocet, Demerol, morphine, OxyContin, lortabs, darvocet, dilaudid, roxycodone. The pain, she says, was so bad it caused her to become suicidal.
“I tried to help myself. I was fighting a losing battle.”
She spent a month in rehab in 2004 and, as part of the aftercare program, she attended group therapy once a week. She also started galloping horses, with dreams of riding again. Then her mother was diagnosed with dementia. She died in late 2006 at age 58. “That destroyed me,” Gulas says. And it led her to begin using again. In fact, Gulas’s drug habit had escalated so much so during her mother’s illness that her weight dropped to 78 pounds.
Longtime friend Carol Arseneau Peters reached out to help.
“She was dealing with a lot and then her mom got sick,” says Peters, a retired jockey who started her career at Woodbine around the same time as Gulas. “Within that whole five-year period there were things that quickly combined and snowballed. Unfortunately, that led into a downward spiral and she couldn’t get herself out of there.”
Peters was living in South Florida with her husband and their young child when she sent Gulas some money to fly down to stay with them. The one stipulation: no drug use. It took some time but Gulas was able to kick her habit, return to the racetrack and once again start to rebuild her racing career — that is until she suffered the “mother of all concussions” in a morning training accident on a July summer day in 2007.
“That was pretty much the end and the start of the major downfall,” Gu- las says.
A few months later, she fell off another horse in what would turn out to be her final ride. That was followed by the death of her stepfather, a man whom she considered her father, after a long battle with cancer.
When Gulas began using pills again, Arseneau Peters asked her not to visit her or her family anymore.
“To be honest, she wasn’t safe to be around my family,” Arseneau Peters says. “She was just really lost.”
Gulas was a recluse in her trailer park home when she sought relief from a Florida doctor. She claims he “pounded” her with significant quantities of high-dosage painkillers and anti-anxiety medication.
“I didn’t use all the pills, but when I tell you how many of those things I could take in a day . . . you don’t want to know,” she says.
At the time, South Florida had become a hot spot for buying and selling illegal painkillers. Gulas was running out of money but had a few pills kicking around. She figured maybe she could sell a few — a one-time thing — pay some bills, get her life back on track and perhaps even make a return to riding.
She got a tip from a friend — a man who happened to be serving time in county jail for dealing drugs. During one of her visits to the prison he told her he had a friend coming to town from South Carolina and Gulas could make money selling him her pills. She resisted the idea at first but the temptation proved too much.
They met in a mall parking lot on a Monday around 4 p.m. She got into his car and he started pulling out stacks of money. He told her to count the pills she had. He then excused himself to grab more cash from the trunk; she continued counting.
A bang from the back of the car startled her. When she looked up, she was surrounded by a SWAT team, guns pointing directly at her.
“Oh my God, it was like what you see on TV!” she says. “I don’t even know where they appeared from. “Knowing what I know now and being more clear-minded, it was screaming a setup the whole way through, but I was so blissfully ignorant of everything.”
Gulas was arrested and charged with one count of trafficking heroin between 28 grams and 30 kilograms. If convicted, she would face a minimum of 25 years in prison and up to a $500,000 fine.
Gulas pled “no contest” and, as part of a plea agreement with the prosecutor she was sentenced to eight years behind bars.
Arseneau Peters says she was “mortified” upon hearing the news about Gulas. She was also relieved.
“It was really to the point I thought I was going to get a phone call and it’s either going to be she’s arrested or she’s dead,” Arseneau Peters says. “To me, the arrest was the better of the two.”
Inside the maximum security prison, Gulas gradually began to turn her life around. She got clean, for one. She found pleasure through art and writing programs and even studied to become a veterinary assistant through distant learning courses from the Stratford Career Institute. She received her diploma after passing with a mark of 99 per cent.
She also befriended a few of the inmates, but there was one in particular, Shelly Goldman, a woman who had overcome her own bitterness and anger and took it upon herself to help others in the prison system through their struggles, that Gulas is thankful for.
“For some reason she reached me. She taught me to basically speak all over again,” Gulas says. “I couldn’t hold a conversation. I would turn beet red, look at you as if I might hurt you, and run away. I was really kind of scary. I looked like a wild animal. My bangs were down to my chin.”
Slowly she began to open up. And feel happiness inside.
“I decided if I was going to live, I had to do it right. I knew if I couldn’t make it clean in prison, I’d never make it outside of there. For the first time I was happy. It’s not happy like I am now (on the outside), but not in troubled suicidal mode. It just opened up my eyes even more.”
Arseneau Peters kept in contact with Gulas and remembers how dramatically different she looked the first time she saw her in prison.
“It was sort of sad but comforting, too, to see my dear friend again — the person I know and loved and knew she could be and not the person unfortunately that was consumed with her problems and addicted to pills and changed who she was,” Arseneau Peters says. “It was tough, very emotional, to see someone you loved dearly in that situation — finally she seemed healthier (but was) stuck behind bars.” Not anymore. On Feb. 16, her 48th birthday, Gulas was released from prison early for good behaviour. She ended up serving 61⁄ years of the eight-year sen
2 tence — 18 months pre-trial and another five in maximum security prison. She is back living with Arseneau Peters and her family and helping manage their horse farm, Oak Wood Stables, in Davies, Fla.
Ask her about a comeback to racing and she’s somewhat ambivalent.
“It’s what I love, it’s all that I loved, lived for, breathed for the majority of the time,” she says. “But I also realize that I don’t want to waste time. I’m not going to win every race and enough can go wrong the minute the starting gate doors slam open.”
It’s been a long, tough journey, but Gulas recorded a victory far greater than anything she experienced riding. Best of all, she’s happy.
“Being arrested and sent to prison was what set things in motion for my life to be saved,” she says.
Longshot Laurie beat the odds again.