(originally published in November 2020 TROT Magazine)
Melissa Keith
Although he’s based at Truro Raceway, the 68-year-old horseman’s black, orange and white colours have become a familiar sight at all stops around the Maritime stakes calendar. “I’ve been around a long time doing it,” says Romo. “When I was a kid around Sackville, I just kind of hung around the barns and got into it, and like I say, I was lucky enough to make a decent living at it.” With family roots that include Sackville Downs regulars Winston “Soupy” Campbell (who married Romo’s mother’s sister) and Wayne Rudge (his mother’s brother), he was off to a good start early in his racing career.
“When I first started, I worked for the Department of Highways with a surveying crew,” he tells TROT. “I got out of school and one year I went down to work in Foxboro, Massachusetts, with a guy there, Elmer Smith. I knew I was more or less going to be in the horse game, so I worked for Dougie Walsh a few years and went down to Maine. As soon as I turned 18, I started driving horses.” His first pari-mutuel drive was at the old Exhibition Grounds in Halifax. In his first year as a licensed driver at Foxboro, Romo’s horse edged out that of Herve Filion, former winningest driver in the sport, in one tight finish.
In 2020, despite training the win-streaking two-year-old rewriting the region’s track records, Romo opted to hand the lines of Woodmere Stealdeal to catch drivers Marc Campbell and Clare MacDonald. The rationale has less to do with his age, or the gelding’s, and more to do with major shifts in racing style that have extended to Nova Scotia, PEI, and New Brunswick. “Young guys kind of roll them harder,” he says. “When I was at my peak, I trained and raced horses and I’d try to race them a little easier. I didn’t want to push them like they do nowadays.”
He’s not finding fault with Campbell’s or MacDonald’s drives. It’s just that they’re different from when he was taking to tracks across the region with greater frequency, and a two-year-old named Woodmere Stealdeal hadn’t toured Truro Raceway’s half-mile in 1:54.1 en route to a perfect record. “I’ve had some good colts, and it’s hard to get through the whole year with nothing going wrong,” notes Romo, recalling “Stealdeal” and Campbell’s hair-raising trip in their $10,540 Nova Scotia Stake division at Northside Downs September 19. “We had the seven hole in the back tier in Cape Breton that day, and I was scared, but Marc gave him a hell of a great drive. Got around the first turn, got out, and before the quarter pole, he was on top.” Woodmere Stealdeal stole away by a length and a half for the 1:57 win, at the Cape Breton track where he already held the 1:56.2 track record for two-year-old pacers.
Years before the Maritime Horse of the Year and divisional O’Brien hopeful arrived on the scene, Romo had already declared he had had enough of handling both training and driving duties in the most competitive races. “I just said to the owners, ‘Look, I don’t want to drive stake races anymore. I’ll just qualify them and race them in overnights at Truro, get them ready for a stakes race,'” he recalls.
Woodmere Stealdeal is a gelded son of the late Steelhead Hanover and solid-producing dam Very Ideal Hanover, and was the fourth-most expensive yearling at the 2019 Atlantic Classic Sale. Kevin Dorey of Middle Sackville, NS and Robert Sumarah of Halifax, NS had visited PEI’s Woodmere Farm that Old Home Week and had their hearts set on the good-tempered yearling. They landed him for $22,500 and enlisted Romo to teach Woodmere Stealdeal how to race.
Sumarah has had horses with Romo since the 1970s, and returned to Standardbred ownership in recent years. Dorey is from a Sackville Downs racing family. Both are well-acquainted with Romo’s ability to develop young horses. “I had a top two-year-old back in the 70s that was only beat one start all year, Aarons Blazer,” notes the trainer. “I had him when I was only twenty-something years old, starting out. I think it was ’78. Ralph Mailman bought him, and he was just a cheap horse, a thousand dollars I think. We raced him as a three-year-old and he won a couple, and I think they sold him for $75,000 or something, in the states.”
At the time Sackville Downs permanently closed in 1986, it was the top racetrack east of Montreal. The loss dealt a crushing blow to the industry at a business and personal level, as Romo remembers vividly today. “At the time that Sackville closed, I was at my peak,” he notes. “I was like 15 wins ahead of everybody when they closed in August, and the money was way ahead. I was getting better every year, and when it closed, I had a wife and two small kids and a house in Sackville. I didn’t really want to up and go” to Ontario, Quebec, or the United States.
Fortunately, his skills and his relationships allowed the career horseman to continue in his field while remaining in the Maritimes, even as many others left for greener pastures. “My owners said, ‘If you want to stay here and race in the Maritimes, we’ll give you the horses’, and they bought horses every year,” recalls the grateful Romo. “I stayed, and I did good at it. I went to Moncton after Sackville closed; I was leading driver there the first year. I went back to Truro; I think I still hold the record for the most wins at Truro in a season.”
Memorable horses punctuate his career across the decades. His favourite remains a horse who retired to Romo’s Shubenacadie, NS backyard when his racing years came to an end: “I owned a horse who was second in the Gold Cup [and Saucer], El Perfecto. He was in there a couple of times. He won pretty much every Invitational except the Gold Cup.”
“We bought him as a racehorse. We got a syndicate of ten people, good people, and we had a lot of fun. We raced him for two years, and I think he made like $130,000. We raced him here, and then he raced in Montreal in the wintertime. He did good up there, then he came home and he raced in every Free for All and he was always in the money, pretty much.” A fitting retirement was due at the end of El Perfecto’s racing days: “We sold him for $50,000 and bought him back for $1,500, just to more or less retire him home here.” The gelding suddenly passed away from colic at home, at age 25.
Romo’s backyard has space for two horses, complete with stalls and three or four acres to graze. So when another of his favourites ended up in a difficult place after retirement from racing, the mare became another fixture on his property until her passing at age 32, on Christmas Day.
“It was just kind of a fluke,” explains Romo, telling the story of how Fussys Filly made her way back into his life. “Ernie Gillan had her, and sold her to somebody and they bred her. The guy had her and the foal up around Kennetcook. Kenny Green called me and said, ‘That mare and the foal are up there, and there’s no grass in the field.’ So we went up there, me and Kenny, and we bought the pair of them for $1,100. He said, ‘I don’t really want a young horse,’ so I bought him out. I just kept raising the foals, and Ernie wanted to buy half of them. Some of them made $25,000-$30,000 in the stake races, then I’d take them to Harrisburg and get $14,000-$15,000 American for them, and go back again. We had a lot of fun with her.” Decades after racing Fussys Filly, Romo enjoyed hearing a Meadowlands simulcast in which the mare’s daughter, Fussys Girl Grace, was cited as dam of a fast-record pacer in the post parade.
Although Woodmere Stealdeal’s multiple track records and undefeated season have elevated Romo to renewed prominence in 2020, the horseman will forever be associated with the horse he considers the best of his lifetime. “It has to be Firms Phantom,” he states. “You get two straight years where he wins every race and never gets beat. Two years in a row, 28 wins. Just keeping them from getting sick or something happening all the time… I didn’t think about it at the time, but I knew the pressure was getting to me. Twenty-two wins, twenty-three wins, and he was kind of a goofball. When I used to take him to the Island to race, I’d have to bring rubber to put on the walls because he’d kick and stuff like that. He used to try to hurt himself all the time, but when he’d go to race, he was tough.” Stablemate Manawar was a quality stakes colt campaigning in the same division as Firms Phantom, so Romo had to enlist Gilles Barrieau to drive one of them whenever they crossed paths.
The legendary “Phantom” raced himself out of same-aged competition locally. The gelding’s win streak was snapped when he broke stride in a Western Fair Preferred pace, November 19, 2001. “When I was at Harrisburg, I could have sold him for pretty good money,” recalls Romo. “Some guy in California wanted to buy him. I phoned him up, but the owners didn’t want to sell him.” Firms Phantom’s former trainer/driver admits he was disappointed to watch the champion finally taste defeat.
“I raced him around Inverness and Sydney without no headpoles on him, and they went and put a big burr headpole on him,” he remembers. “Like I say, he was a goofy horse and he didn’t like you to change a lot of gear on him. I was at Truro one day and we were watching him come out in the post parade on the [Western Fair] simulcast; I said, ‘I don’t know if he’s going to get around that first turn with that friggin headpole.’ And sure enough, he didn’t. But he came back on later and ended up being a pretty good horse. He was a hell of a horse.” The 2000 and 2001 Atlantic Canadian Horse of the Year suffered an infection after being injected in Ontario, leading to his being euthanized. Otherwise, it’s very possible that he, too, might have lived out his golden years back at Romo’s home.
“I had a lot of good colts back in the day,” recounts the Truro Raceway regular, who celebrated his 68th birthday in October. “I’d go to the Island and win two or three stake races in a day. Joey Green worked for me, it must have been 15 years, and we had some good years, I’ll tell you that.” He mentions Last of Bella and The Rev as two other pacers who excelled and helped shape his career. There’s not enough room in this article to adequately describe the numerous colts and fillies who had their early lessons turn into stakes victories under his careful watch.
The tradition continues today, only less visibly, as his orange-and-black-checkered white driving colours have largely ceased to appear on-track for the stakes races themselves. He was in the sulky behind owner Ian Banks’ two-year-old pacing filly Elm Grove Penney in her $15,000 Maritime Breeders Stake division at Truro October 18, when she was third to record-setting rival Aspoonfulofsugar in the 1:56.1 mile. Catch drivers were in demand that card, and Romo holds his own on home turf.
Woodmere Stealdeal and Elm Grove Penney have now finished their season and are readying for some time off. Romo says his owners are looking forward to their three-year-old stakes in a way that can’t be matched by racing overnight horses through the winter. “The old-timers from Sackville, they still like it, but you can’t have a racehorse,” he notes. “If you buy a colt, you’ve always got the dream, something like we’ve got now [with Woodmere Stealdeal]. A lot of them are not, but it’s like with Somebeachsomewhere: When they bought him, they got the dream of getting a good one.”
The climate has changed since the days of Sackville Downs, and in many respects, it’s not for the better. “Those days were better racing days for money and stuff,” admits the trainer/driver, who would like to see regional purses better reflect the improved breed of today. “The Maritime Breeders the other day went for $15,000. I won it a few times. I don’t know how many horses I won that race with when it was $50,000. When it raced for $50,000 back then, but now we’re going for $15,000, we haven’t got ahead very far.”
“I could retire, the wife is saying retire, but it’s just…what do I do?” he muses. “Sit around? All I’ve ever done is horses, so I keep cutting back. I used to have 20 horses, then it was down to 15. I had eight last year. I was down to six for the summer when I sold a couple. The three-year-old colt we sold raced at Yonkers the other night and the filly that raced at Western Fair tonight, Madam Dolce, we sold her. I don’t really want racehorses at Truro. I’d rather just have four or five colts, something to play around with.”
With a newly-hired assistant to help muck stalls for him as temperatures drop, Romo is also looking ahead to Woodmere Stealdeal’s three-year-old comeback, and the revival of the win streak. He and Robert Sumarah confirm that the gelding is going to luxurious Sumac Farms in Pictou County, NS, and will not be venturing to Ontario. “I was watching the Ontario [Sires Stakes] Super Finals. There’s a lot of Maritime connections in all of them big races,” remarks the trainer, who opted out of that move without regrets. His unflappable top prospect has the healthy lungs and appetite to see him through another exciting season in 2021. Another veteran developer of regional stakes stars shares Romo’s optimism: “Clare [MacDonald] drove him in Cape Breton and I said, ‘How was he?’ Usually Clare will give you her opinion pretty good. She said, ‘He’s the real deal.'”
