Arthur’s Trevor Henry managed to stay quite humble even after capturing the title of Canada’s top harness driver of 2012.
“I drove a lot of horses,” he said on Dec. 31, explaining his success to a crowd of family, friends and longtime business partners in the harness racing industry.
“It’s probably just a matter of hard work and always showing up.”
Henry, 41, made the comments in the winners’ circle at Western Fair Raceway in London – with just 15 minutes remaining in 2012 – while holding a large sign officially declaring him the nation’s top harness driver.
Henry finished the year with 533 wins, leading his closest competitor, Billy Davis Jr., by 71. On the North American stage, his win tally places him seventh.
Henry drove in 2,113 races in 2012, a feat which requires many seven-day work weeks. He piloted about 400 more horses last year than he did in 2011, plying his trade at tracks across the province, including the four-hour roundtrip to Western Fair Raceway four times a week.
He secured the 2012 season title with races at the London track, plus those at Clinton Raceway, Grand River Raceway and Hanover Raceway. The horses he drove in 2012 earned more than $3.4 million (drivers earn five percent of the purses won by the horses they drive).
Henry is consistently one of the top performing drivers in Canada. Over the past decade, he has claimed several seasonal titles at the aforementioned racetracks and is a two-time winner of the Lampman Cup, which is awarded annually to the top point-earning driver in the Ontario Sires Stakes program. In 2011, he represented Ontario in the National Driving Championship in PEI.
For the past few years Henry has been a mainstay in the top 10 of Canada’s top dash-winning standings, but this is the first time he has clinched the prestigious Canadian title.
“Sometimes you get on a roll, but it’s mostly about driving good horses for good trainers. That’s the biggest part of it,” Henry said.
Most tracks card 11 to 12 races per night, and a popular driver like Henry is listed to drive in each dash. In 2012, he frequently won four or more races per night – an anomaly which for him became a regularity.
On Hanover Raceway’s Heritage Day, Sept. 15, he tied the record for most wins in a night with seven victories (the title is also held by fellow Arthur horseman Bruce Richardson).
On that night, Henry’s wins included a race named in honour of his father, Ross Henry, the patriarch of Henry Stables and one of the province’s most successful conditioners of young racehorses. Prior to his retirement in 2006, Ross Henry trained 533 winners in nearly 4,000 races, for purse earnings of more than $7 million.
Trevor Henry grew up with horses his entire life, and began training and driving in 1989 at the age of 19. With as many as 70 horses in training at any given time on the family farm, he eventually decided to concentrate on driving. His wife Shannon currently trains a stable of horses that made 75 starts this year and earned $225,000. The couple has two children: Ty, 16, and Tessa, 11.
While both may be proud of their dad, they are not eyeballing the family business.
“Tessa wants to be a hairdresser. Ty wants to be a mechanic,” Henry notes.
To date, Henry is a lifetime winner of 4,598 races and has driven in more than 25,000 dashes. He’s driven horses to purse earnings of over $30 million.
