No cure for harness racing

Don Anness spends nearly every morning at the Emo Speedway, but he doesn’t race stock cars. Rather, he’s into harness racing—and they practise even in the winter.
“We hardly miss any time at all, unless it’s really cold,” Anness noted last Friday afternoon after a good training session that morning. “But this year has been good. It’s so mild.
“We take them [the horses] out every day except Sunday, usually, and go four or five miles with them,” he added. “That’s basically about it until the snow goes and then we start teaching them how to go faster.”
Anness, who retired from the Ministry of Transportation in 1994, works with Don Kinnear, his partner on a few horses, and his wife, Sheila.
“She makes sure things run smoothly in the barn, which is a big help,” he remarked.
They maintain the race track themselves—plowing it in the winter and just keeping it worked up in the summer.
Anness has had horses since about 1965, when started off with a brood mare he purchased.
“And we’ve been racing since 1968 on a part-time basis,” he enthused. “You know, weekends and things like that, mainly in Manitoba and a bit in Saskatchewan.”
The circuit Anness participates in over in Manitoba lasts 11 weeks.
“We leave here about the middle of June and we stay in Holland, Man.,” he noted. “That’s our central base and then we race every weekend starting the last weekend in June through to the first weekend in September at different locations.
“We go to Dauphin, Portage La Prairie, Wawaneesa, Killarney, Miami, [and] Glenborough.”
Eight horses run each one-mile race, with a good race averaging around two minutes, four seconds. Anness’ horse, “Friendly Farmer,” broke the track record at Wawaneesa one year with a time of 1:58.
And they’ve had many other successful horses over the years, too.
“In 1976, we had a horse called ‘Gambler’s Chance,’” Anness recalled. “He was a good three-year-old.
“In ‘82, we had a real good horse called ‘Timbrooke Direct’ and we sold him to Alberta people and he went on to race and made almost $300,000.”
In 2002, Anness had a filly that he kept her himself, named “My Friend Flicka,” who was named “Horse of the Year” in Manitoba that year.
“We raced her at Woodbine and Mohawk in Ontario,” he noted. “And we could have sold her, but decided to keep her for a brood mare.”
In 2004, “Friendly Farmer” captured “Horse of the Year” honours after winning all the stake races in Manitoba as well as the Saskatchewan Colt for Charity. He’s racing at Woodbine right now.
Besides just liking horses, Anness said he enjoys the competition of harness racing.
“[I like] the fact that you take a young horse from before it’s ever been broke and you turn it into a race horse,” he explained. “And the thing is after you’ve been in a while, it gets in your blood.
“It’s kind of like a disease that there’s really no cure for.”
Anness recalled watching the harness races at the Emo Fair when he was a kid.
“And I always thought someday I’d like to have one of those things,” he remarked. “So we got one [horse] and ended up with quite a few.”
Currently, Anness has 12 horses and will be training nine of them. But he also is trying a new venture.
“Last year I bought a trotter—these are all pacers that I’ve had,” he explained. “I bought a trotter in Toronto and I’m hoping to break into the Ontario Sire Stake with this horse.
“The money in Ontario is tremendous, with all the tracks having slot machines and so it has increased the purses tremendously.”
Anness admitted it is the slot machines that keep harness racing going.
“It’s kind of ironic that they almost killed racing in the first place and now they’re saving racing,” he said, noting the betting dropped off when more ways of gambling became available.
“Back in the ’70s and early ’80s, all you had really was your Bingos and things like that,” he added. “Nowadays, you’ve got the casinos, the VLTs, and slot machines wherever you go.”
Anness also said it is a tough business.
“We’re doing it, I guess, more for the enjoyment,” he stressed. “The way things are with the expense of everything now, it’s getting harder and harder to make it a viable thing.”
For the last three years, they went down east and were able to sell horses, which helped them out a lot.
It’s also a difficult business because there is no interest in racing among younger generations.
“There used to be four of five of us that had horses. That was in the ’70s,” Anness recalled. “Racing was a big thing in Manitoba then. Since then, it’s dwindled right down.”
And he noted the fan base is pretty small.
“A lot of the fans are older people and, of course, they’re passing away and getting so they can’t come to the races anymore,” he said. “It’s hard to get people interested in it.”
Anness believes the location of Rainy River District might have something to do with the lack of interest.
“As far as the racing is concerned, we’re sort of in the middle of nowhere,” he remarked. “We’re quite a ways from Manitoba, and we had racing in Emo here in the ’60s and early ’70s but it was pretty costly to put it on.”
Anness said he’ll likely continue harness racing for a while yet, but that he’s trying to cut back.
“We’re gradually cutting back because we want to start to do a few other things,” he noted, saying he and his wife would like to travel. “The horses have pretty much consumed our whole lives pretty well other than our jobs. . . .
“We’re getting older now and we feel we’ve done this a lot and we’ve had a good time at it.”
But he added it’s one of those things that’s hard to quit.
“I’ve threatened to quit a few times,” he admitted. “But it seems like just about the time you’re ready to quit, you get one or two good ones—ones you think are going to be good, so you race these horses and see how they turn out. . . .
“It gets in your blood, and you just can’t seem to totally get rid of it.”