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Reade Baker - Sovereign Award-winning racehorse trainer

By Frances J Karon
First Published: 16 July 2009 - Issue Number: 13

On a warm morning in Toronto, Canada, Reade Baker maneuvers his car around the sprawling facilities of Woodbine Racetrack. The car with the “AFLEET” license plate detours to Afleet Street, intersecting with Glorious Song Avenue: this is history-steeped Woodbine country. He drives from barn to track, supervising a set of horses every half hour. Some mornings, Baker will accompany his string from the back of a pony, but not today; despite the sunshine, this is “unponylike weather” for the trainer, who doesn’t like the cold.
His assistant, Leroy Trotman, of whom Baker says, “He’s not good. He’s great,” is never farther away than his walkie-talkie, Trotman’s voice crackling over the audio periodically. Baker gestures towards the training track. “I think we’ve got more and better facilities than any place in North America. I’ve been to every place in North America. We’ve got this full mile dirt track, a seven-eighths turf, we also have a sand ring and a field you can train in. I don’t know anybody who can match that.” And in the winter months – when it’s freezing in Toronto even by general standards – he relocates to Palm Meadows Training Center in Boynton Beach, Florida. “I’ve got the best of both worlds. I think there’s no better place to train horses [than Woodbine] and I don’t think there’s any better training center than Palm Meadows in the wintertime.”
It was a focused journey from the dairy farm on which he was raised in Port Dalhousie, Ontario, to the backside of a racetrack for Reade Baker. He was drawn to the spectacle the first time he went racing. “We had all these horses at the farm, they were just horses; they weren’t all clean and spiffy.” What captivated the then-14-year-old, who was with his uncle at Fort Erie, was that “all of a sudden this horse comes in, he’s slick as a seal, he’s got these bandages on and the women were just absolutely gorgeous with all those fancy clothes on. And I thought, howdy doodle! Now – and then the kicker came, ah! – you just had to walk up and bet and they give you money. What a game this is!”
His parents were none too pleased when their son expressed a desire to go into the horse business. “We had that picture of that seedy character: broke, cigar coming out of his mouth.” Caught skipping school to attend races, he was carted off to boarding school, but his love for racing never dwindled. He didn’t know specifically what he wanted to do, just that he “wanted to be on the racetrack,” he says. “I thought that was the ultimate.”
The “first Thoroughbred [he] ever touched on the racetrack” was 1963 Canadian Triple Crown winner Canebora, who attempted a comeback with Baker’s boss, Windfields’ trainer Pete McCann, in ’65 after a failed stud career. “He was a beast, that one.” While he may not have fond memories of his racetrack initiation with a former breeding stallion, it was an early opportunity to observe a very talented horse, and Baker has tried to surround himself with equally talented horses since.
Baker had ridden only the horses on the family’s dairy farm, but future Hall of Fame trainer Gil Rowntree gave him a chance to ride Thoroughbreds. “Well, they didn’t have any money, so that’...

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