There's lots of work in the world, but perhaps none so rewarding as honing a precise craft. For these two men, the blood and sweat they shed in the name of shoeing your horses is just part of the job. In some ways, they might argue, it's actually the best part of all.
By Keith McCalmont
Clad in jeans and a limb-saving blacksmith’s apron, 34-year-old Phillippe LeClerc circles a motionless bay pacer in cross-ties, like the chief of a NASCAR pit crew figuring out which wheel on this single-horsepower vehicle needs attention first.
LeClerc spots something in the right rear limb and nimbly crouches down, back straight and knees bent. He grasps the hoof and raises it to eye-level for inspection.
“He’s a miracle,” exclaims LeClerc, nodding at a long narrow scar. “Look at that leg. He probably got stuck in the fence at some point in his early life and he’s a conditioned pacer at Woodbine right now, even with a leg like that.”
The blacksmith places the leg back down and circles again before pulling the shoes off the horse.
There is little room to manoeuvre in the shed row, but LeClerc makes it work — all the while speaking at the same rapid pace at which he moves.
“Obviously it’s pretty archaic,” says LeClerc, raising a hammer and driving a nail through the new shoe and into the hoof of his quiet client. “It’s nails and steel. Can you imagine working with that all day? I’m sure there’s still a lot of improvement that can be done with the shoeing. We have all sorts of new technology today, but this hasn’t changed much in a thousand years.”
I cringe as the blacksmith pounds away at the nail, mere inches from his bare and breakable fingers, watching nervously as his rare misses pound into the protective hard shell of his apron; it luckily spares his crouching limbs certain agony.
The tools of his trade, metallic and oversized, are menacing by appearance, but move gracefully (albeit noisily) in the hands of the skilled labourer.
“You have to use a shoeing hammer,” offers LeClerc, raising his trusty piece of iron in the air, “because if you use a bigger hammer it just doesn’t work as well.”
With a flourish, he flips the tool at an angle and in one fell swoop shears the sharp protruding nail ends off the outer edge of the horse’s hoof.
Steven Durand, a 24-year-old trainer, took his own approach to his blossoming career as a blacksmith. “Instead of apprenticing, about four years ago I started buying books on the farrier trade,” Durand admits. “I picked up different ideas from different places and people — everyone from standardbred farriers to saddle bred farriers — and I took a lot of advice from the old blacksmiths around. Then I came up with my own way of doing things.”
His parents, Tom and June Durand, run a busy racing stable and so the curious kid came into his trade naturally.
“When I first started, I was very young. I’d help dad out by jogging horses, but I always liked watching the farriers and helping them out,” he grins. “After I started training horses for four or five years, I got interested in shoeing them my own way.
“Slowly, I started working on older horses. Some of the bad-gaited horses, I started fiddling around with their shoeing and I got a bit of a passion for doing it. It took off from there.”
Given that Durand is part of the increasingly unemployed Generation Y (pegged at 17.2 per cent by Statistics Canada a year ago) — the so-called ‘Millennial’ generation that is forever fixated on digital culture — it is refreshing that this youth has taken a hands-on approach to making a life for himself.
Durand insists the ‘I can do it myself’ attitude is hard-wired into his psyche.
“If something is broken, I usually try and fix it myself before I spend the money to take it in somewhere,” laughs Durand. “I do like working with my hands a lot. Especially with the horses. I really enjoy being around the horses and I always felt that I could do a better job shoeing them than some of the guys that were coming in, because I trained the horse. I understand the horse’s movement a lot better than a blacksmith or farrier that just came in and looked at his feet.”
The horseman simply had to make this particular career work as he couldn’t imagine a life spent working in an office, hammering away at a computer instead of a horse.
“No. I really can’t,” he admits. “I have to do all my billing and all my paperwork for all the clients I have and it just frustrates me like crazy.”
But he deals with the parts of his gig that he doesn’t like so that he can embrace the parts of the job that he loves. “The main thing is working with animals,” he says. “I love animals and I like individually working with horses. I like to take on tricky jobs and figure horses out. It gives me lots of satisfaction to shoe a horse and see it go out on the track and do well.”
Whether he’s looking at an under-run heel or trying to figure out which bar shoe will offer the best support, Durand is exercising a significant degree of critical thinking to give the horse a more comfortable ride, and his client a better chance at winning.
“I like to be very crafty with my hands, so I especially like doing the ones that are more difficult,” says Durand. “I really put some thought into the way the horse moves and sometimes I get a bit of success changing things up a little bit.”
Durand agrees he is something of an old soul embracing a forgotten, but necessary, profession. “I do feel like that,” he laughs. “I don’t see too many guys my age out here. I think there’s a lot more guys retiring than getting into it.”
Maybe that 17.2 per cent might want to consider putting down their smart phones and pick up a hammer instead.
No doubt there’s plenty of opportunity for a blacksmith in the racing game.
“They go two, three starts if you’re lucky and then the horse needs to be reshod,” nods LeClerc.
Pointing at a small crack in the outer wall of a hoof he’d like to shoe but can’t, he demonstrates the importance of an observant tradesman. “See the inside wall? It’s all broke apart, so I can’t nail into it. We’ll use this glue and rebuild the wall and then we can nail into that. Sometimes this really helps a horse. We can glue a shoe on without the nail, or rebuild the wall, which is what we’ll do here.”
A particular North America Cup candidate from two years ago, he recalls, was helped out by this very process. “He had four feet rebuilt with this glue and we nailed into that because he was very thin-walled,” he says. “Some people, when they buy a horse, they rebuild the wall right away.”
It seems hard to believe that a blacksmith armed with little more than a serious amount of glue, a hammer and a few nails might effect the outcome of a $1.5-million race. But LeClerc begs to differ. In his estimation, a freshly shod horse has a better chance of winning. “No foot, no horse,” he exclaims. “It’s like the foundation of a house. This horse, two weeks ago, he blew a puss pocket there (on his left front) and now he’s blown one here (on his right rear.) I can’t even press on it with my thumb (without the horse flinching) so imagine the horse trying to pace on that.”
LeClerc, who was once in university pursuing an engineering degree, opens a puss pocket in his charge’s foot. He’s managed to locate a different kind of mechanical problem for the tender-hoofed animal. “I wanted to work with robots,” he laughs, but gesturing at an oozing hoof, he admits that maybe he’s become something of an agricultural engineer instead. “It’s a nice bio-mechanic. It’s a very complex structure, the foot.”
The horse, nose pointed skyward, visibly exhales as LeClerc drains blood from the pocket. Puss and blood drip to the floor as the blacksmith relieves the pressure. He’s bothered, but simultaneously relieved. “We’ll try to take the pressure off and try to pare it so that it doesn’t carry too much weight,” says LeClerc, disappearing to his truck to heat up the edge of the metal shoe.
When he returns, he’s brandishing a piece of metal burning bright orange in colour, and cauterizes the wound.
The horse doesn’t flinch. But as the scent of burning tissue and blood fill the air, I can’t help but cringe as I’m reminded of a particularly painful moment at the dentist when drill met tooth. It’s clear I wield a pen... not a hammer.
Durand speaks enthusiastically about his profession, and you can tell he was raised right by the way he speaks about his elders. “A lot of the guys I learned from are retired now, but I attribute a lot of my success to them as they have been supportive of me shoeing,” he says. “Whenever I need help or get stuck with something, they’re always there to give me their opinion.”
Learning the trade within the confines of his family’s racing business was a huge boon to Durand. “When I first started out, it was purely because I was training the horses and I felt like I could shoe the horses more to the way they would be comfortable going,” he recalls. “My mom and my dad helped to get me started and we work really well together.”
‘Team Durand’ enjoyed an incredible amount of success in 2011 with their gelded trotter Whiskey Tax. The now four-year-old bay made 15 starts in 2011, winning three times, including a lucrative second place finish to Broad Bahn in the $1.5 million final of the Hambletonian. “I guess the most credit I can claim is with Whiskey Tax, but he didn’t have too many problems,” grins Durand. “However, there’s been a lot of horses that I see certain things on... like under-run heels.
“An under-run heel is when the tubules of the heels roll under because the force upon the heel is too great. The easiest way to describe the shoeing style I do is to say I work to fit a horse full in the heels, because a horse needs limb support. If you don’t have your shoes full enough in the heels, your horse won’t just have foot problems, it will cause other soundness issues within the limb.”
It would seem that both LeClerc and Durand are on the same page when it comes to the foot being the foundation of the horse.
And Durand is well aware he’s hardly reinventing the wheel when it comes to his choice of trade.
“People are shoeing horses the same way they were doing it 500 years ago,” he admits. “There are gimmicks that come out but really farriers are stuck in the old days because everything is as it was years and years ago.”
He’s hopeful, in light of recent events surrounding the Slots at Racetracks program in Ontario, that the industry will continue to flourish and that other young folks, like him, might find their way into the profession.
“If I ever had kids I would want them to do what they have a passion for doing,” he says. “But, if that was working with horses, that would be great. I think you should always do what makes you happy in life and if they would love the horses like I do, then that’s what I would want for them for sure.”
And then, perhaps remembering he’s still only 24 and has a fair bit of living ahead, he adds a postscript. “Although,” he grins, “I haven’t really thought about kids yet!”
Back in his truck, LeClerc is showered in sparks as he applies a torch to a shoe that needs to be customized to the shape of a large, oblong hoof.
He enjoys his job, and unlike his young counterpart, he is supporting his young daughter Madison.
LeClerc got into the game at the urging of his father, Pierre. “He’s still racing at Quebec City and at Rideau once in a while,” he says. “He’s retired from the paper mill. I got into horses to make him happy, but I never thought I’d end up where I did.”
Out of the truck and back to the horse, LeClerc files away at the hoof with a rasp. His today out-of-the-ordinary profession, creating custom footware for high-powered equine athletes, makes him and his colleagues something of a Nike-on-wheels of the horse racing world.
The job takes him from barn to barn and track to track in his little white truck filled with the tools of the trade. He’s mobile, not digital, and he likes it that way. Office life is not for him. “That would get annoying,” he says. “Here, there’s no routine. Today we’re here, tomorrow another training centre and the next day somewhere else. Every day you see different people and different horses. I’m always against the traffic and I never get stuck in the rat race on the 401, and I never need to go to the gym because I sleep well at night, let’s put it that way.”
It’s been nearly 45 minutes working with this horse and by his own estimation, he’s moving too slowly because he’s talking to me.
“You don’t want to rush, but a horse will be good for you for 45 minutes,” he explains.
For his efforts, he charges $100 per horse, not including the price of the materials. He’ll visit up to eight horses a day, working five days a week, and it took him some time to build his body strength to this point. “When I started, I’d shoe one horse and be done for the day, just exhausted,” he recalls.
But he clearly loves the life he has carved out for himself with his trusty tools.
“I would struggle not to be outside,” he says. “I really like to be with the fresh air, myself. Even in the winter if it’s too cold, or in the summer too hot, I just adapt. I like to be listening to the birds right now and I’d rather smell manure than oil and chemicals.”
He’s not afraid of competition. If anything, he’s hopeful more young folks will want to get involved.
“Approach any blacksmith and ask if they need help,” he urges. “I always have an assistant and I’ve taught a couple people. Some went on and did it and some went home and cried because it was too hard for them. But if you like horses and can deal with the pressure, go for it!”
At long last, LeClerc’s first horse of the day is shod and ready to return to his stall. The blacksmith’s calloused hands are from the irksome puss pocket, and his face is blackened by bits of steel sparked out of the welder.
Perhaps recognizing the state of his own appearance, he throws his hands in the air with a wide smile. “If you see a blacksmith and want to know if he’s busy,” he offers, “look at the scars on him!”