Prolific owner and breeder George Millar is convinced horses kept him alive. Now dreams of his 2-year-old filly Chantilly taking on the boys in next year’s Pepsi North America Cup are key to sustaining him another year.

by Dave Briggs

George Millar is dreaming about horses again and this time it’s a biggie. He is thinking about racing his undefeated homebred 2-year-old pacing filly Chantilly against the boys in next year’s Pepsi North America Cup at Woodbine Mohawk Park. He insists he’s “a little over 50 per cent serious” about it, despite the fact a filly has never raced in the NA Cup, one of the world’s premier events for sophomore pacers.

Millar’s private trainer, Nick Gallucci, shook his head when Millar first broached the idea.

“It was just a little bit of shock,” Gallucci said. “I don’t know if he had been thinking about it for a while. When he brought it up to me, it kind of threw me for a loop. But, what am I going to say? It’s his horse. Still, it’s a pretty cool situation… We’ll do our best. Looks like she could beat the colts, but who knows? I think, for now, there’s a lot of dreaming.”

Precisely.

Truth is, this dreaming out loud is more than just an indication of how much talent Millar believes Chantilly has — the depth of which he said the world hasn’t seen, yet, because she was carefully managed during her rookie season. NA Cup dreams also speak to Millar’s incredible passion for horses and his desire to promote the sport he loves.

But, underneath it all, this may also be an unspoken exercise in self-preservation.

Millar is living proof of the veracity of that famous quote about the power of horses. No, not the oft-repeated one attributed to Winston Churchill (and others) about the outside of a horse being good for the inside of a man, but a similar one that goes something like, “If you want to live to see another year, get yourself a yearling.”

Science backs that up. Research has shown that having something to look forward to reduces stress and boosts a person’s mood, both of which have proven to be positive for longevity.

In Millar’s case, horses have been sustaining and nourishing him most of his life.

So much so, he’s convinced horses saved his life three years ago and then rewarded him for sticking around by gifting him his best year in nearly five decades in the business.

MILLAR’S NEW LUNGS WERE INFECTED WITH COVID-19

The health part of the story is a horrific tale and Millar is, indeed, lucky to be alive.

The day after he received a double lung transplant in February of 2021, doctors discovered the lungs they gave him were infected with COVID-19. So began a battle for Millar’s life where part of getting through each day involved hearing about how his horses were training and fighting to get to see them again.

More than three months later, when he was finally released from the hospital, his first stop upon arriving home to his Aurora, ON farm, was to go up to his barn to thank his horses — despite his wife’s insistence that he go straight to bed.

“It took a while to get there,” Millar said. “I wasn’t walking too fast, but they were kind of shocked to see me. It was so nice to be back in the barn with my horses.”

That year, Millar and Gallucci campaigned four outstanding homebreds: 2-year-old pacers Silver Label, Prohibition Legal and Betterhavemymoney, along with sophomore pacer Powertrain. Millar’s stable earned more than $1.8 million in 2021 — his best year ever — and collected three O’Brien Awards honoring the best of the year in Canada, including the Armstrong Bros. Breeder of the Year Award. Beyond crediting Gallucci for the success, Millar has one other explanation for why 2021 was such a terrific year on the track.

“I think my horses got wind of [my health problems] and they felt sorry for me and they said, ‘We’ve got to race well this year and make George feel good,’” Millar said. “That’s how I justify it sometimes. My horses made me feel good. When I was in the hospital that’s all I could think of was my horses.”

THE CHERRY ON TOP OF A CAREER YEAR

On March 30, 2022, exactly 52 days after the O’Brien Awards ceremony honoring the 2021 season, Chantilly was foaled at Millar’s farm.

Nearly three years later — and nearly four years after his double lung transplant — Millar is still trying to regain the strength he needs to get back on the track more regularly behind his own horses.

“I tried to go back out this summer and it just didn’t work,” Millar said. “I lost a lot of my strength, my muscle strength, so I’m working out with a trainer three times a week to try to get that muscle back, because… I used to be like 245 and I’m down to about 185 pounds now, so I just lost a lot of weight. I haven’t been that size since high school. But getting your strength back is a little bit hard.

“All I’m thinking about is that I’m going to get better and I’m going to be out there training again.”

Gallucci said Millar would rather jog a horse than win the North America Cup. “That’s why he does it, just to enjoy the horses,” the trainer said.

At the top of Millar’s list is sitting behind Chantilly. Though, he’s not sure he could train her, and jokes he’s not sure Gallucci would let him, anyway.

“I think she’s pretty easy to jog, but I don’t know if I’d want to go a training mile with her,” Millar said.

Millar will turn 75 in 2025 and, beyond jogging horses, he wants to stay alive to see what Chantilly can do during her sophomore season — Cup or no Cup.

Asked what he loves about the daughter of Big Jim out of Shiraz Seelster, Millar said, “Everything. Absolutely everything. I get goosebumps when I watch her racing. I’ve owned some good mares, like Silver Label and Prohibition Legal… Label’s got $1.3 million made now. It’s $900,000 for Legal and I thought, ‘How blessed am I to have two great homebreds and fillies that are going to go into the broodmare band?’

“Then, along comes Chantilly and she’s done things as a 2-year-old that I’ve never seen a horse do. She seems like she can go parked forever. It’s the first time I’ve ever had a horse that I don’t worry about getting parked. She can get by anything when she wants to. She’s just amazing… She had four or five times where she could have raced sub-1:50 and was eased up going to the wire. It’s just crazy. I’ve never had a 2-year-old that could pace like this. I’ve never owned a horse that could be like that. It’s just like, ‘Wow, she’s really something special.’

“Just night after night, race after race, she’d throw in these miles. Sometimes you just shake your head and say, ‘I don’t really believe what I’m seeing.’

“It’s just that natural speed, that brush that she has. We’ve talked about the way the muscles go from her hip over the powerful rear end that she’s got… She’s just got muscle in the places where you want her to have muscle.”

MILLAR’S OWNED MORE THAN 1,500 HORSES

That Chantilly could be the best of at least 1,500 horses Millar estimates he has owned in the 47 years he’s been in the game is incredible.

“I’ve got 100 [horses] now,” he said, figuring the total number could be as high as 2,000 lifetime.

As for how much money he’s spent on horses, Millar laughed and said, “We don’t want to put that in print – my wife would kill me.”

Gallucci said, “there are not too many people that invest as much as [Millar] has. Most people would never be able to make the amount of money he’s lost in horses, and he’s still back for more. So that shows you what kind of person he is and how much he enjoys the horses.”

That Millar has invested almost every penny of it in his native Ontario — even going so far to build his own stellar, Kentucky-worthy farm north of Toronto — is just part of the equation. He has owned almost all of his horses solo. The reason is simple: He wants total control of his horses’ welfare.

“Partners, I don’t need,” Millar said. “You decide when you want to rest them and race them and who you want to breed to… Once I make up my mind, I don’t really want to have to ask somebody for their approval. I don’t need that. I’ve been running my own show for a long time. I just don’t need that input… Win or lose, I’ll take care of it myself.”

As yet another example, Millar recently purchased his third farm in his area of Ontario. The plan is to use most of it to keep his retired horses.

“I’ll put them over there and just let them live their life out in peace, just the way a horse should, because they’ve done so much for me… I love them, you know,” Millar said.

Gallucci said Millar, “definitely does care about their well-being… and does want to see them have nice lives after racing.

“Now they only want to do the [microchips to identify horses], but he makes sure all of his homebreds get the tattoo as well to identify them easier if they should happen to end up in a kill pen.”

Millar acknowledges he has been fortunate to have built a highly-successful paper recycling business that has allowed him to do what’s best for his horses and control every aspect of their care.

When he sold Hanna Paper in 2023, he had four recycling plants in Canada and five in the United States. It is the largest high-grade paper recycling company in North America.

“I’m not a religious person, but God put me on this earth to run recycling plants,” Millar said, laughing. “I was good at it and I had the right people… We sold at the right time, put it that way.”

Even when he had the business, Millar said horses were an integral part of his success.

He often started his day jogging or training horses before heading to the office. Often, after a difficult day at work, he ended his day with horses.

“Sometimes when I would come home from work and it was a tougher day, I’d drive right up to the broodmare farm and I’d just go out and see my broodmares and foals,” Millar said. “I’d look at them for 15 or 20 minutes and then come home and it just seemed to put me in this relaxation mode that took away all the pressure.”

Even just a few weeks before he had his double lung transplant, Millar was still jogging horses with an oxygen tank strapped to his back.

“I think the last horse I trained that year before my transplant was Betterhavemymoney, who won the O’Brien Award that year for best 2-year-old pacer. Nick wanted to get rid of the broodmare, didn’t think he was going to be any good and I said, ‘No, he went a good mile today – keep her around. We’re not selling the broodmare.’”

Millar long ago learned not to overlook horse karma.

FROM EXPENSIVE YEARLINGS TO HOMEBREDS

The funny thing about all this is that, for years, Millar went about it the wrong way.

Still, his recent success is counter-intuitive.

For many years, Millar was a man who routinely bought the most expensive yearlings sold at the Canadian sales.

“Sometimes, when I went to those sales, to be truthful, because I could afford those most expensive horses I thought, ‘Might as well take the most expensive one home,’ but it just didn’t work out that well,” Millar said. “A couple of them did okay, but not too many.

“It took me awhile… about $3 million or $4 million dollars, before I started figuring that out – that my homebreds were better than these expensive yearlings that I was buying. I’d prefer to race my own homebreds now because, quite honestly, I think they are better.

“A couple more like Chantilly and [Prohibition] Legal and [Silver] Label and I might break even in this sport.” With that he laughs deeply and then shares the real secret to his success.

“It started when I had Nick Gallucci come over to train my horses,” Millar said. “It took my farm to a different level. I gave him the wherewithal, the funds, the money and the horses to do it and he just knows what to do with them.”

That Chantilly is a homebred out of one of those expensive yearling purchases is a particular point of pride for Millar. But Gallucci admits Chantilly has bucked the odds. Shiraz Seelster was purchased for $107,000, but only made $28,000 on the track and had just one career victory in 2:01. Though Millar has had a lot of success with Big Jim offspring, Gallucci points out the stallion has modest credentials, as indicated by his $5,500 stud fee. It’s one of the reasons they decided not to stake Chantilly to too many events in the United States this year. Though, the main reason was to protect a 2-year-old.

“[Chantilly’s driver] James [MacDonald] just said, ‘You’ve got to not over-race this horse,” Millar said. “Save her for the Grand Circuit because she’s a Grand Circuit horse’, so that’s what we tried to do.”

Millar said he didn’t seriously consider taking her to the U.S. to race.

“You know, 3-year-olds and up you can do it and it’s not a problem, but it’s hard on fillies,” he said. “Traveling is tough. Half of them tie up and you’ve got to get down there a bit earlier. Taking a 2-year-old and shipping it that far, especially after a bit of a long and grueling season, it’s just really hard on them. So, I just couldn’t really see the point of paying into a Breeders Crown. She was eligible for the Breeders Crown, but I just didn’t make the payment because it’s an 800 or 900-mile trip to get down there and you have to go to a different barn that she’s not used to and she changes her habits and it’s a different paddock… anything could flare up, she could tie up a little bit and then you’re not going to get the same horse. There are just too many variables.

“I’m looking forward to the Breeders Crowns at Mohawk next year and I’m looking forward to racing her in the Breeders Crown as a 3-year-old, but hopefully taking it easy on her at 2 will make her a really good 3-year-old as well.”

Chantilly ended the year a perfect nine-for-nine with earnings of $560,315 and a mark of 1:50.2.

“We could’ve made a lot more money with her,” Millar said. “I didn’t race her in the Battle of the Belles, she was eligible. And I didn’t race her in the Champlain because I wanted to space the starts a little bit more and I didn’t want to give her more than nine or 10 races. I think she would’ve been an easy winner in the Battle of the Belles at $140,000 and the Champlain went for $100,000, but then she’d have to go right into the Shes A Great Lady. I did that conferring with James MacDonald and with Nick.

Through it all, Millar said Chantilly “didn’t lose a pound and her coat was always shiny.”

THE NA CUP DREAM

As for taking on the boys in next year’s NA Cup, Millar believes Chantilly is more than capable of posting a :48 mile.

“Not just because she’s mine, but she could’ve beaten the colts this year,” Millar said.

“How much are they going to change between 2 and 3? She’s going to have to pace in :48, but I’m thinking this mare could pace in :48… She could’ve dropped a second if she had been pressed anywhere as a 2-year-old and gone in :49-and-change. Do I think she’d go with them? I don’t think she’d be embarrassed… And it would make for a nice story.

“I don’t want to hurt her, but I don’t think it would hurt her. It’s the same thing, too… you can pay up and if you think you’re just not right or whatever, then you can just not enter. I think she just took care of herself all year and the fact that she wasn’t over-raced really helped her out quite a bit.”

There he goes, dreaming again. He’s never stopped.

“I have been fascinated with horses since I was a little kid,” Millar said. “I’d go to bed at night and dream about horses.

“When I was a teenager, myself and a bunch of buddies, four or five of us, did trail riding. We didn’t have much money, so we cleaned out some stalls and did some work and then it cost a few bucks, but not much, and they’d take us out for a trail ride and we loved that.

“So, that’s one of the first things I ever bought, when I got out of university, was a riding horse. I had seven or eight riding horses and I’d take my wife out for a date and we’d go for a ride on a horse. I just always have had this love of horses.”

Through it all, horses have been the interconnected thread of Millar’s life. Fittingly, they’ve helped make his dreams come true.