Trainer Profile - Roger Attfield
/By Alex Campbell
At 78 years old, Hall of Fame trainer Roger Attfield is still at the top of his game, showing no signs of slowing down.
“While I’m well and healthy and enjoying it, I’ll keep on doing it,” Attfield said. “I enjoy the horses. I always have. I’m still enjoying the people and my owners that I’m working with, so there’s no reason not to.”
While some people are born into the sport, Attfield developed a love of horses all on his own. Born in England to Leslie, a coal merchant, and Gladys, a stay-at-home mother, in 1939, he grew up in the town of Newbury. Attfield said that as a child, he would often venture off with a group of foreign settlers that made their home just outside of his village.
“The Romaners used to come up and camp on the village green, and still do apparently,” Attfield said. “They used to come up there with donkeys and goats, and when I was very young I followed them up. They sort of befriended me up there. My parents went mad when they found me because they thought they were stealing me. I fell in love with animals, and especially horses, from a very early age.”
This love of horses led him to a riding school. His parents didn’t have the means to pay for lessons, so Attfield funded them himself by working for farmers in the area.
“I started riding for some local farmers that had ponies kicking around,” Attfield said. “I used to do a milk round and I used to go ferreting for rabbits and sell the rabbits to the village and the local butchers to get enough money to go to the riding school.”
As Attfield got older, he moved into competitive riding. He started with show horses and eventually raced steeplechase horses as a teenager, where he won the juvenile steeplechase championship in 1955 at 16 years of age. The next year, he enrolled in the Berkshire Institute of Agriculture, where he specialized in farm management. Once he finished his education, Attfield started his own training and breeding business, while also riding show jumpers at the same time.
But as he moved into his 30s, Attfield was finding it tough to get by, even while competing in international equestrian competitions. In 1970, he made the decision to move to Canada in search of greener pastures.
“It’s pretty hard to make a living, no matter how well you’re doing, riding jumpers and show jumpers,” he said. “You had to sell the odd horse every now and then to make ends meet and you’re working really, really hard. That was getting to be a little tedious, and I didn’t see how I was going to do much better financially.”
Attfield had established a good foundation in the horse business during his time in England.
“A number of the people that I rode for were horse and cattle dealers, and they were just true farmers and horse people,” he said. “I used to go around sales and ride for a lot of these horse dealers that were really, really good horse people. I was always asking them questions and listening to conversations. I was always surrounding myself with some pretty good older horse people that really knew horses.”
Attfield said it was easy to spot the differences in horseracing between England and Canada once he made his first visit to Woodbine Racetrack in Toronto.
“When I first came over, I went down to the track with Frank Stronach one morning,” he said. “It was an eye opener for me as opposed to how we train horses in England. I was going into a situation where there’s riders and hotwalkers and grooms. Back home, somebody would do two or three horses and do everything with them.”
Attfield said he initially gave himself three years in Canada before he was going to move back to England. His first job at Woodbine was as a freelance exercise rider, but he quickly moved into training himself. He was given the opportunity to spend one season at Blue Bonnets Raceway in Montreal with Stronach’s trainer Fred Loschke, but when the meet at Blue Bonnets ended, Attfield wasn’t sure if he wanted to continue in racing.
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