Woodbine Oaks favourite on fast track against all odds
London Tower’s success helps trainer Steve Owens move on long after barn fire
Steve Owens will never forget that devastating phone call that woke him up at 2 a.m. on Aug. 3, 2002.
His Woodbine barn was on fire and it was raging out of control.
“I couldn’t believe what I saw when I got there,” said Owens, 55. “It was everything we had built up for 10 years. That week alone, our horses won seven races.”
Owens, his wife Beverly and several of their clients lost more than a dozen horses in the fire. Among them was the champion horse, Highland Legacy, that gave Owens and his family their biggest win two years earlier, in the Coronation Futurity.
It has been a long 13 years of rebuilding for Owens, but he is back with a tall and feisty filly by the name of London Tower, the likely favourite for Sunday’s prestigious Woodbine Oaks, worth $500,000.
The Oaks, being run for the 60th time, is the most important race in the country for Canadian-born 3year-old fillies. Last year’s winner, Lexie Lou, went on to win the Queen’s Plate.
The evolution of London Tower as a top-class runner is remarkable. The talented filly is one of just six foals of racing age for her sire, Head Chopper, who lives in Owens’ backyard and was bred to a few mares, almost as a lark.
“I raced Head Chopper with a couple of partners,” said Owens about the stallion that was bought as a yearling for $35,000 at the Woodbine sale of 2004. “They didn’t want to be a part of a little breeding business with him, so I took him to my farm.”
A knowledgeable and sharp horseman, Owens took a chance and bred a couple of his mares to his unproven stallion. Two of the first three foals by the sire, including London Tower, won stakes races in 2014.
“To stay in this industry, you have to buy or breed horses each year,” said Owens, who does all the foaling, farm work and training of his horses. “So I breed.”
It was his love of a gamble that immersed Owens into horse racing when he was just a child living with his grandparents in England.
“I used to sit on my grandma’s lap and they gave me a pin and I would stick it on the racing entries and pick a horse,” said Owens. “Then my grandpa would take me to the betting shop and we would bet a few quid.”
Owens arrived in Canada with his parents and immediately went to work at the track with a dream of being a horse trainer. Once he took out his licence, he had a great deal of success claiming horses and turning them into stakes winners.
He had years where his horses won $1 million in purses, until that tragic day in 2002. He has had a couple of good years since, but in 2013, when London Tower was only a year old, he won just a single race in 31 starts.
“It takes many years to raise and develop a horse,” said Owens. “You don’t know what you have until you start training them and then you just have to keep your fingers crossed and get lucky.”
London Tower was the boss of her foal friends when she was a youngster and bossed her racing rivals around last year as a stakes-winning 2-year-old.
She won her first race of 2015, the Fury Stakes, and will be ridden in the Oaks by one of Woodbine’s newest faces in the jock’s room, Alan Garcia.
“We are just getting back to where we were (before the fire),” said Owens. “I never forget that day but I try to raise and develop good young runners to overshadow the tragedy. A win by London Tower in the Oaks would be amazing.”