Justin Stein’s Most Unusual Life
Aug 19, 2015 22:01:24 GMT -5
Post by Evelyn on Aug 19, 2015 22:01:24 GMT -5
An interesting story. I think he should order all his whips in green! He is one of my favorite Woodbine jockeys.
Justin Stein’s Most Unusual Life
by Beverley Smith
Paulick Report
Young Elias Stein, pushing five years old, has urgent advice for his father, Justin: “Use the green stick, dad,” he says. And then the questions always come: “Did you win a race with it? Did you use the green stick?”
Yes, Justin Stein used that green stick to win the Queen’s Plate at Woodbine racetrack in 2012 with Strait of Dover, and then he retired it, relegating it to a special place in his homey estate near Caledon, Ontario. But one day, one or two of his four young sons got a little ebullient, perhaps burnishing an imaginary hide. They broke the green stick. That hurt.
Stein has nine whips in his collection. Sometimes they just accumulate. But the green one was special. He bought it from a tack shop on the Woodbine backstretch, a castoff from another jockey who, strangely enough, ordered a green one, and then didn’t pick it up. He wasn’t meant to have it really. But it ended up in Stein’s hands, nevertheless, and it felt right. He had an epiphany last spring. He decided to have fellow jockey Steve Bahen repair it for him. Stein used this renewed green whip to win the Woodbine Oaks in June with Academic, a 66-1 longshot who tore away from a field of Canada’s top fillies with such ease that Stein looked back over his shoulder, wondering where the competition was.
The win was strange enough, ordained perhaps, and so similar to his win in the Plate three years before. In both races, he wore orange silks (different owners). The race was run the same way: a mount with high cruising speed going to the front, never to be headed. And there was that green stick that Stein played like a Stradivarius.
Last weekend, Stein tucked that green whip into his bag for a 1,700-mile trip to Edmonton, Alberta, to ride Academic against colts for the first time in the $200,000, Grade 3 Canadian Derby, at 1 3/8 mile over the dirt track of Northlands Park. Some thought Academic one-dimensional: a speed horse that couldn’t stay in the Queen’s Plate after she had been burned on the lead by the bolting Sweet Grass Creek.
Stein knew better. He had felt when she won the 1 1/8-mile Oaks that she could have kept on going. And so there they were, at Western Canada’s biggest racing day, with its richest race, and festival of big frothy hats. Stein had to use the whip only three times on Academic, who disposed of the race’s heavy favorite, Blue Dancer (winner of seven of eight starts, his only loss coming in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile last fall) by the quarter pole. She had swished past him in a gallop and when Stein chirped to her, she took off, and won by eight lengths. No longer one-dimensional, she had patiently settled off the lead to snare this important win.
Academic ran the distance in 2:18.49, the fastest Canadian Derby since 2001, at a distance that requires the field to circle the track twice. She was the first filly to win since 2003.
Western Homecoming
Stein’s win in the Canadian Derby in Alberta was a homecoming of sorts for him. Born in next-door British Columbia, Stein had never ridden in a Canadian Derby and it had been 10 years since he had ridden at all at Northlands Park. He had been an apprentice and finished second in a stakes race, and ever since he’s chided himself for making a mistake, for not winning the thing. So much has changed since then.
At Northlands, he caught a glance of his uncle, a former rider who always had to fight his weight and rode the bush tracks a lot. Stein is a third-generation jockey. Seeing his uncle didn’t cause a blink since he lived next to the track. But Stein knew something was up when Uncle Gary told him that he had someone else that wanted to see him: his grandmother. He hadn’t known she was coming.
Grandmother Faye had seen Stein ride in that Northlands race 10 years ago. For 49 years, she had toiled as a mutuel clerk at Stampede Park in Calgary. She was a firecracker, well loved. In her early eighties, she still drives a car and lives by herself. Stein’s father Robert drove all the way from British Columbia to bring her. Gathered for the winner’s circle photos, Stein stood with his arm around his grandmother, his uncle and his father and said: “She’s the matriarch of us all.” Faye sprouted a tear.
That Stein followed in the footsteps of his father and, indeed, even his grandfather, was never a given. Yes, his grandfather, Art, rode at Blue Bonnets in Montreal before coming home to ride in Vancouver. He won his first race in 1946 and named himself to the horse. Stein’s father, Robert, started riding in Calgary, won his first race at Turf Paradise, then settled in Vancouver, where he rode for 10 years before becoming a highway trucker. Riding was the furthest thing from Stein’s mind when he grew up in the small logging town of Barriere, in the interior of British Columbia, just north of Kamloops.
The Stein family lived like old-school pioneers, a world away from the international swagger of Woodbine, where Stein hangs his hat now. For three months, they lived in two campers, with no electricity or water. Definitely off the grid. “We roughed it,” Stein said. “I loved it.”
When Stein was about 15, he helped his father build their new home, a small rustic cabin, with no water or hydro. Their first priority? Get water. “It sucks having no water,” Stein said. The family would hike into town to do their laundry. Meanwhile, he was also hauling buckets of water by hand for the 17 horses that his father bought from auctions in hopes of conducting a trail-riding business, a hobby. They heated the house with a big wood stove, and after about two years, the Steins and their neighbors chipped in together to have hydro poles erected along the road on which they lived.
Because his father was on the road all the time, Stein got firewood for the family and fed all the animals. The horses were of all breeds: Quarter Horses, Arabians, draft horses, cross-breeds. Some were tame. Some were wild. Stein could handle the ones “that weren’t fully broke” and he rode them all, rode them down steep cliffs to test himself, and even sometimes slept in the fields with them. Stein was first on horseback when he was not quite a year old. “I’ve ridden horses since I can remember,” he said.
He has had more jobs than he can remember, too. Jockey wasn’t one of them. In fact, he had an entire set of wildly varying life experiences before he ever mounted a racehorse: He was a firefighter. He was a chef, but couldn’t stand being indoors and quit. He worked as a groundskeeper at a golf course. He chased cattle for ranchers for free, just for fun on weekends; he did some team roping and cattle penning. For a month, he caught wild horses in the desert of southern British Columbia. He was a trail guide for five summers in national parks, sometimes taking as many as 50 people into the woods and mountains. He camped with horses. He swam horses.
Once, while swimming horses in a lake, he got caught in a violent rainstorm, which hit instantly. “The lightning was right on top of us,” he said. “The trees were breaking around us like matchsticks. They were getting ripped out of the ground, bending in half. There were these giant old-growth Douglas firs falling across the trail in front of us, beside us, behind us. We were all bareback.” They jogged home. It was useless to panic. Still, he was terrified. To this day, Stein can’t abide a wind storm.
All the cowboys from miles around would come to the Stein family’s jackpot roping contests. They were Stein’s heroes. He learned so much from different horsemen.
In 2003, a forest fire swept through the area and destroyed many homes, as well as the sawmill in Barriere. It had been the town’s major employer. The mill was never rebuilt, leaving the town hobbled for years. Stein calls it a ghost town now. The fire stopped about a block from the Steins’ home. But through it, he met Renee, his future wife and the mother of his four children. She had rented the house next door to tenants. The fire brought her out of the woodwork.
Renee, a psychiatric nurse, had been telling a friend about the new mountain man she was seeing and when she revealed he stood 4-foot-11, came the question: “Is he a jockey?”
“What’s a jockey?” Renee said.
But it got her thinking. She did some research. And she rented the “Seabiscuit” movie video and asked Stein if he was interested in being a jockey. And finally the jockey DNA in him took hold. He started galloping horses at the bush tracks for free, just for experience, and within a year, he was riding at Hastings Park in Vancouver. Late to the game, he was already 24 years old. The next year, he was a hot apprentice and he was addicted.
Off to Woodbine he went to seek his fortune. When he won his Queen’s Plate in 2012, he had been riding only eight years.
Not Your Ordinary Neighbors
Since then, Stein and his wife have carved out a remarkable life for themselves that is anything but ordinary. They have four sons: Owen, 10, Jeremy 8, Elias almost 5, and Gavin, 2, all of them born (helpfully) on dark days or during the winter. “They are all completely different personalities,” Stein said.
They all idolize him. When he comes home from the track, they follow him everywhere. They all wear the same shoes as he does: Blundstones. Like their dad, they all wear a little handkerchief in their back pockets. Stein puts the three older boys to bed every night, gets them to brush their teeth and say their prayers and put things away and then reads them stories. Stein doesn’t do a lot of things outside of his family life. “They are my priority,” he said.
Truthfully, Stein doesn’t have time to do anything else. He’s transformed his three-acre plot in the hills near Caledon into a paradise of structures and fields and pig pens and paddocks and hen houses and playhouses. He drew up no designs, just built, drawing on his experience from having constructed the family cabin in Barriere.
These structures house a menagerie beyond compare. The Steins have three dogs (one is a rescued greyhound), 12 chickens (hear that rooster crowing in the neighborhood? It’s coming from the Stein property.), three pigs and 16 rabbits. And yes, two horses, one a pony that Jeremy rides with abandon. “He’s been bucked off so many times – and hard,” Stein said. He rides bareback.
Then there is Stormy Lord, the Kinghaven Farm steed that won more than $1 million while running on the grass around North America. He ended up in the hands of owners Ken and Sarah Ramsey, and when they retired him, trainer Ian Black arranged to get him back. Stein, who rode him four times, put in a word for him. There was a long line of people, all wanting to adopt him. Two weeks after he came back to Canada, Stein had the chestnut with the signature blaze and the unusual white hairs all through his chestnut coat.
“Stormy” has become an important part of the family. “He is awesome,” Stein said. “I can rope off him. I can take him trail riding. He’s very sure-footed. He’s very happy, very friendly. He nickers to you. He comes over to the fence. He wants to be scratched. He’s pretty gentle. His class shows.” Stein pulls out a photo on his smartphone that shows Stormy lying down in the paddock, with two young Steins on his back.
And Stein built Stormy’s home. He erected a barn that has a loft and a steel roof. He cleared the paddock and turned a mud patch into a grassy field. This spring, he built a pig pen for two big sows and a little black-and-white boar, who looks as if he has his work cut out for him. Stein intends to breed the sows to him when he’s ready and fully grown. Stein raises the pigs and rabbits for meat. In the pen, he’s built a lean-to with a thatched roof and now the grass is growing over it. The chickens, who have free range of the property, supply eggs.
And that’s not the end of it. Stein bought an 18-foot Georgian Bay fishing boat, built in 1949, and erected it on stilts; it’s a pirate ship, a playhouse for his sons. Stein’s sons don’t play video games or watch TV. They don’t have cable. “My boys play outside all day long,” he said. “They ride their bikes. We go on hikes. We ride the horses.”
When Stein can’t get outside in the winter, he rock climbs in a gym. He takes his two oldest boys with him. “They are fearless,” he said. In his yard, he has strung up a 40-foot-long tightrope, which he says aids in his conditioning: it helps balance, it works the core, it teaches focus and fine muscle control, it teaches you to breathe. “It’s my yoga,” Stein said.
“I’m very fortunate,” Stein said. “I don’t take any of those good things for granted. I’ve had bad things happen and you learn from them. But my family life is better than you could possibly imagine. My wife and I are so deeply in love. It’s better than when we first met. We have a beautiful home. We have our dreams. I have a job that I love. I get to ride horses. It’s fun. It’s liberating. You get to go fast.”
And what a ride he’s had.
Cute photo! I wonder if his boys will be taller! (Stein's really short!)
Stein with two of his four sons: “My boys play outside all day long.”
Justin Stein’s Most Unusual Life
by Beverley Smith
Paulick Report
Young Elias Stein, pushing five years old, has urgent advice for his father, Justin: “Use the green stick, dad,” he says. And then the questions always come: “Did you win a race with it? Did you use the green stick?”
Yes, Justin Stein used that green stick to win the Queen’s Plate at Woodbine racetrack in 2012 with Strait of Dover, and then he retired it, relegating it to a special place in his homey estate near Caledon, Ontario. But one day, one or two of his four young sons got a little ebullient, perhaps burnishing an imaginary hide. They broke the green stick. That hurt.
Stein has nine whips in his collection. Sometimes they just accumulate. But the green one was special. He bought it from a tack shop on the Woodbine backstretch, a castoff from another jockey who, strangely enough, ordered a green one, and then didn’t pick it up. He wasn’t meant to have it really. But it ended up in Stein’s hands, nevertheless, and it felt right. He had an epiphany last spring. He decided to have fellow jockey Steve Bahen repair it for him. Stein used this renewed green whip to win the Woodbine Oaks in June with Academic, a 66-1 longshot who tore away from a field of Canada’s top fillies with such ease that Stein looked back over his shoulder, wondering where the competition was.
The win was strange enough, ordained perhaps, and so similar to his win in the Plate three years before. In both races, he wore orange silks (different owners). The race was run the same way: a mount with high cruising speed going to the front, never to be headed. And there was that green stick that Stein played like a Stradivarius.
Last weekend, Stein tucked that green whip into his bag for a 1,700-mile trip to Edmonton, Alberta, to ride Academic against colts for the first time in the $200,000, Grade 3 Canadian Derby, at 1 3/8 mile over the dirt track of Northlands Park. Some thought Academic one-dimensional: a speed horse that couldn’t stay in the Queen’s Plate after she had been burned on the lead by the bolting Sweet Grass Creek.
Stein knew better. He had felt when she won the 1 1/8-mile Oaks that she could have kept on going. And so there they were, at Western Canada’s biggest racing day, with its richest race, and festival of big frothy hats. Stein had to use the whip only three times on Academic, who disposed of the race’s heavy favorite, Blue Dancer (winner of seven of eight starts, his only loss coming in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile last fall) by the quarter pole. She had swished past him in a gallop and when Stein chirped to her, she took off, and won by eight lengths. No longer one-dimensional, she had patiently settled off the lead to snare this important win.
Academic ran the distance in 2:18.49, the fastest Canadian Derby since 2001, at a distance that requires the field to circle the track twice. She was the first filly to win since 2003.
Western Homecoming
Stein’s win in the Canadian Derby in Alberta was a homecoming of sorts for him. Born in next-door British Columbia, Stein had never ridden in a Canadian Derby and it had been 10 years since he had ridden at all at Northlands Park. He had been an apprentice and finished second in a stakes race, and ever since he’s chided himself for making a mistake, for not winning the thing. So much has changed since then.
At Northlands, he caught a glance of his uncle, a former rider who always had to fight his weight and rode the bush tracks a lot. Stein is a third-generation jockey. Seeing his uncle didn’t cause a blink since he lived next to the track. But Stein knew something was up when Uncle Gary told him that he had someone else that wanted to see him: his grandmother. He hadn’t known she was coming.
Grandmother Faye had seen Stein ride in that Northlands race 10 years ago. For 49 years, she had toiled as a mutuel clerk at Stampede Park in Calgary. She was a firecracker, well loved. In her early eighties, she still drives a car and lives by herself. Stein’s father Robert drove all the way from British Columbia to bring her. Gathered for the winner’s circle photos, Stein stood with his arm around his grandmother, his uncle and his father and said: “She’s the matriarch of us all.” Faye sprouted a tear.
That Stein followed in the footsteps of his father and, indeed, even his grandfather, was never a given. Yes, his grandfather, Art, rode at Blue Bonnets in Montreal before coming home to ride in Vancouver. He won his first race in 1946 and named himself to the horse. Stein’s father, Robert, started riding in Calgary, won his first race at Turf Paradise, then settled in Vancouver, where he rode for 10 years before becoming a highway trucker. Riding was the furthest thing from Stein’s mind when he grew up in the small logging town of Barriere, in the interior of British Columbia, just north of Kamloops.
The Stein family lived like old-school pioneers, a world away from the international swagger of Woodbine, where Stein hangs his hat now. For three months, they lived in two campers, with no electricity or water. Definitely off the grid. “We roughed it,” Stein said. “I loved it.”
When Stein was about 15, he helped his father build their new home, a small rustic cabin, with no water or hydro. Their first priority? Get water. “It sucks having no water,” Stein said. The family would hike into town to do their laundry. Meanwhile, he was also hauling buckets of water by hand for the 17 horses that his father bought from auctions in hopes of conducting a trail-riding business, a hobby. They heated the house with a big wood stove, and after about two years, the Steins and their neighbors chipped in together to have hydro poles erected along the road on which they lived.
Because his father was on the road all the time, Stein got firewood for the family and fed all the animals. The horses were of all breeds: Quarter Horses, Arabians, draft horses, cross-breeds. Some were tame. Some were wild. Stein could handle the ones “that weren’t fully broke” and he rode them all, rode them down steep cliffs to test himself, and even sometimes slept in the fields with them. Stein was first on horseback when he was not quite a year old. “I’ve ridden horses since I can remember,” he said.
He has had more jobs than he can remember, too. Jockey wasn’t one of them. In fact, he had an entire set of wildly varying life experiences before he ever mounted a racehorse: He was a firefighter. He was a chef, but couldn’t stand being indoors and quit. He worked as a groundskeeper at a golf course. He chased cattle for ranchers for free, just for fun on weekends; he did some team roping and cattle penning. For a month, he caught wild horses in the desert of southern British Columbia. He was a trail guide for five summers in national parks, sometimes taking as many as 50 people into the woods and mountains. He camped with horses. He swam horses.
Once, while swimming horses in a lake, he got caught in a violent rainstorm, which hit instantly. “The lightning was right on top of us,” he said. “The trees were breaking around us like matchsticks. They were getting ripped out of the ground, bending in half. There were these giant old-growth Douglas firs falling across the trail in front of us, beside us, behind us. We were all bareback.” They jogged home. It was useless to panic. Still, he was terrified. To this day, Stein can’t abide a wind storm.
All the cowboys from miles around would come to the Stein family’s jackpot roping contests. They were Stein’s heroes. He learned so much from different horsemen.
In 2003, a forest fire swept through the area and destroyed many homes, as well as the sawmill in Barriere. It had been the town’s major employer. The mill was never rebuilt, leaving the town hobbled for years. Stein calls it a ghost town now. The fire stopped about a block from the Steins’ home. But through it, he met Renee, his future wife and the mother of his four children. She had rented the house next door to tenants. The fire brought her out of the woodwork.
Renee, a psychiatric nurse, had been telling a friend about the new mountain man she was seeing and when she revealed he stood 4-foot-11, came the question: “Is he a jockey?”
“What’s a jockey?” Renee said.
But it got her thinking. She did some research. And she rented the “Seabiscuit” movie video and asked Stein if he was interested in being a jockey. And finally the jockey DNA in him took hold. He started galloping horses at the bush tracks for free, just for experience, and within a year, he was riding at Hastings Park in Vancouver. Late to the game, he was already 24 years old. The next year, he was a hot apprentice and he was addicted.
Off to Woodbine he went to seek his fortune. When he won his Queen’s Plate in 2012, he had been riding only eight years.
Not Your Ordinary Neighbors
Since then, Stein and his wife have carved out a remarkable life for themselves that is anything but ordinary. They have four sons: Owen, 10, Jeremy 8, Elias almost 5, and Gavin, 2, all of them born (helpfully) on dark days or during the winter. “They are all completely different personalities,” Stein said.
They all idolize him. When he comes home from the track, they follow him everywhere. They all wear the same shoes as he does: Blundstones. Like their dad, they all wear a little handkerchief in their back pockets. Stein puts the three older boys to bed every night, gets them to brush their teeth and say their prayers and put things away and then reads them stories. Stein doesn’t do a lot of things outside of his family life. “They are my priority,” he said.
Truthfully, Stein doesn’t have time to do anything else. He’s transformed his three-acre plot in the hills near Caledon into a paradise of structures and fields and pig pens and paddocks and hen houses and playhouses. He drew up no designs, just built, drawing on his experience from having constructed the family cabin in Barriere.
These structures house a menagerie beyond compare. The Steins have three dogs (one is a rescued greyhound), 12 chickens (hear that rooster crowing in the neighborhood? It’s coming from the Stein property.), three pigs and 16 rabbits. And yes, two horses, one a pony that Jeremy rides with abandon. “He’s been bucked off so many times – and hard,” Stein said. He rides bareback.
Then there is Stormy Lord, the Kinghaven Farm steed that won more than $1 million while running on the grass around North America. He ended up in the hands of owners Ken and Sarah Ramsey, and when they retired him, trainer Ian Black arranged to get him back. Stein, who rode him four times, put in a word for him. There was a long line of people, all wanting to adopt him. Two weeks after he came back to Canada, Stein had the chestnut with the signature blaze and the unusual white hairs all through his chestnut coat.
“Stormy” has become an important part of the family. “He is awesome,” Stein said. “I can rope off him. I can take him trail riding. He’s very sure-footed. He’s very happy, very friendly. He nickers to you. He comes over to the fence. He wants to be scratched. He’s pretty gentle. His class shows.” Stein pulls out a photo on his smartphone that shows Stormy lying down in the paddock, with two young Steins on his back.
And Stein built Stormy’s home. He erected a barn that has a loft and a steel roof. He cleared the paddock and turned a mud patch into a grassy field. This spring, he built a pig pen for two big sows and a little black-and-white boar, who looks as if he has his work cut out for him. Stein intends to breed the sows to him when he’s ready and fully grown. Stein raises the pigs and rabbits for meat. In the pen, he’s built a lean-to with a thatched roof and now the grass is growing over it. The chickens, who have free range of the property, supply eggs.
And that’s not the end of it. Stein bought an 18-foot Georgian Bay fishing boat, built in 1949, and erected it on stilts; it’s a pirate ship, a playhouse for his sons. Stein’s sons don’t play video games or watch TV. They don’t have cable. “My boys play outside all day long,” he said. “They ride their bikes. We go on hikes. We ride the horses.”
When Stein can’t get outside in the winter, he rock climbs in a gym. He takes his two oldest boys with him. “They are fearless,” he said. In his yard, he has strung up a 40-foot-long tightrope, which he says aids in his conditioning: it helps balance, it works the core, it teaches focus and fine muscle control, it teaches you to breathe. “It’s my yoga,” Stein said.
“I’m very fortunate,” Stein said. “I don’t take any of those good things for granted. I’ve had bad things happen and you learn from them. But my family life is better than you could possibly imagine. My wife and I are so deeply in love. It’s better than when we first met. We have a beautiful home. We have our dreams. I have a job that I love. I get to ride horses. It’s fun. It’s liberating. You get to go fast.”
And what a ride he’s had.
Cute photo! I wonder if his boys will be taller! (Stein's really short!)
Stein with two of his four sons: “My boys play outside all day long.”
