Five join Canadian Hall of Fame

ETOBICOKE, Ontario - He's a Smoothie and Carotene, who performed with distinction both in Ontario and in the United States, on Thursday were named as inductees to the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame.

Trainer Roy Johnson and owner-breeder Frank Selke Jr. were also elected by the Hall of Fame voters, who had been asked to select two horses and two people from the list of candidates.

The late Jim Proudfoot, an editor and longtime sports columnist at the Toronto Star, will be inducted in the veteran's category as the unanimous choice of a nine-member committee.

The induction ceremony will take place Aug. 28 at the Toronto Congress Centre.

He's a Smoothie, who raced from 1966 through 1968, was a multiple stakes winner on both dirt and grass but his biggest win came in the 1967 Canadian International on Woodbine's turf course.

No Canadian-bred was able to duplicate that feat until 1991, and that year's International winner, Sky Classic, was inducted into the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame in 1998.

In a career that pre-dated the Sovereign Awards, He's a Smoothie was named Canada's Horse of the Year in 1967 and champion older horse in 1967 and 1968.

He's a Smoothie, owned and bred by Bill Beasley, also represented Canada in Laurel's 1967 Washington D.C. International, where he finished fourth, and won the Hialeah Turf Cup in 1968.

Carotene, whose forte was turf racing, defeated males here in the 1986 Breeders', the final leg of the Canadian Triple Crown, and also finished second in the E.P. Taylor Stakes in her 3-year-old campaign.

Owned and bred by Kinghaven Farm and trained by Roger Attfield, Carotene later recorded Grade 1 scores in Santa Anita's 1987 Yellow Ribbon and Gulfstream's 1988 Pan American against males. She won six Sovereign Awards, from 1986 through 1988.

Johnson, born in Alberta, started out as a jockey in western Canada but an injury curtailed that career in 1950. After switching to training, Johnson came to Ontario in 1958 and was based here until 1979, when he returned to his home province.

Although he won numerous stakes races across Canada, Johnson is best remembered for sending out the only two Queen's Plate winners bred in western Canada, Whistling Sea in 1965 and Merger in 1968.

Johnson, 75, is retired and living in Calgary.

Selke, who was born in 1893 and died in 1985, made his mark as a Thoroughbred breeder in Ontario before moving to Quebec in 1946, where he continued to operate under the name Rolling Range Farm.

His major success as a breeder was Wonder Where, a filly who was Canada's Horse of the Year in 1959.

Proudfoot, who was born in Kearney, Ontario and died in Toronto in 2001 at age 67, was a well-known and respected figure at local racetracks.

Proudfoot won a Sovereign Award for outstanding newspaper story in 1976 and a National Newspaper Award in 1988 for his investigative coverage of the death of jockey Dan Beckon.