If there’s one thing that harness racing stands out for, it’s for being a family-oriented business. Walk on any backstretch and you’re bound to find stables that share the same names, drivers that match in colors, and kids playing out in the yards. Nine times out of 10, you’ll hear someone entered into the business because of a family connection. While that connection is usually from a family member who is a trainer or driver, for the MacDonald brothers, the connection tied back to their home in Kingston, Prince Edward Island. Gail MacDonald, the matriarch of the MacDonald racing clan, moved to Prince Edward Island when she was in high school and she has resided there ever since. “When my mother, my sister and I moved here to Prince Edward Island, my brother-in-law, Gordon, decided he wanted to be in horses because his parents were involved a little bit way back when in New Brunswick,” said Gail MacDonald. “My mom and he bought a horse, a trotter, so that kind of started him in harness racing and kind of started us hanging around the track and watching the races. When I moved into the Charlottetown area and was looking for a little second job, because everybody’s always wanting another little job, I got one at the racetrack.” Gail met her husband, Freddy MacDonald, at the racetrack. “I was working at the Top of the Park and he was one of the regulars there,” Gail said. “That’s where I met him and I always tell him that I was the best thing he ever won at the track. “When Freddy and I got together and got married, the only way I got him to move out of the city was to get a horse, so we ended up with a few broodmares and we started to race a few horses here and there,” Gail continued. “We had some success with some of our horses, but the biggest success was that the kids fell in love with the horses. They couldn’t wait to have their own horse and they wanted to be around the racetrack. We raised another boy, Bobby Drake, so I always say we have six boys because Bobby was our extra.” Lloyd is the oldest of the six boys, followed by Bobby, Anthony, Mark, Curtis, and James. “There are gaps between my boys. Lloyd and Bobby and then there’s five years and there’s Anthony and Mark, then there’s another almost five years then Curtis and James. They were all at different ends and they tortured each other just like regular hellions,” Gail laughed. Gail became the track photographer at Charlottetown Driving Park in 1988 and the boys were raised at the track. “Their father and I would bring them to the track, they were a mainstay there,” she said. “They, like a lot of kids, especially in Charlottetown, grew up at the track. You never worried about them. Our backstretch has raised more kids than you can imagine and you don’t worry about them because you know that every pair of eyes in that barnyard know who that kid is and they are watching them and keeping an eye out for them. Our backstretch is like our little village.” One of Gail’s memories that stands out as track photographer is her first Gold Cup and Saucer when Ian Moore’s The Papermaker won. “My very first Gold Cup and Saucer was Ian Moore with The Papermaker and that was interesting. I had never seen anything like it. Especially when all of the sudden that’s your job and all these people are crowding around you,” said Gail. “If you ever see the photo of The Papermaker coming across the finish line and if you look in the background, you’ll see this tiny little boy holding the yellow blanket for the Gold Cup and Saucer. It was pouring rain so it wasn’t being displayed and he was holding onto it – that was Mark.” Overall, as a mother and track photographer, Gail recalls the moments that both Mark and Anthony won the Gold Cup and Saucer as her favorite memories. “Watching Mark win and then watching Anthony win, and then hopefully someday I’ll be able to watch James win the Gold Cup and Saucer. Those are always breathtaking for me because I know how much it meant to them,” said Gail. “Also, when I watch some of the other kids that grew up through the Charlottetown Driving Park family and I watch them win the Gold Cup and Saucer, that same kind of look on their face and I see how much it means to them, they are awestruck at the idea that they’ve won what they’ve always watched.” All raised in the same household, the six boys went in different directions but with a similar background and field: harness racing. Lloyd was more in tune with the technical aspect of racing with the simulcast and video. “Lloyd, our oldest boy, started out doing the first color videos because Mike McDonald wanted a color video that he could show at lunch. He had bought a little pizza place in Charlottetown and the idea was that if horsemen would come to this place at lunchtime, they would show the races from the previous race card,” said Gail. “So, Mike got a little colored video camera and Lloyd started doing videos of the races and they were being shown at this restaurant. From there, Lloyd started to make up races and sell them for the horsemen. That was his involvement in the business.” Curtis followed suit with Lloyd in the technical aspect of racing. Today, Curtis can still be found behind the scenes of the racing action, working behind the camera for Central Ontario Standardbred Association (COSA). “With Curtis, he was around the horses a little bit and moved to Ontario, but he was more into the technical stuff with Lloyd,” Gail said. “As Curtis got older, he was more technically inclined in that area than actually wanting to get up behind a horse. He did his share of it – anybody who has ever worked with Anthony has been up behind a horse – but that wasn’t something that he wanted to do all the time. He didn’t mind getting up and jogging or training the horses, but his passion was on the camera, doing the technical end of it, simulcast work, that was what he did and what he still does.” Bobby became a blacksmith and he was an introduction path to working on the backstretch for Mark and Anthony at a young age. “Bobby is now a blacksmith at the racetrack. The boys, Mark and Anthony, started going with him down around the barn area and started doing little odd jobs with trainers like Gary MacDonald, Kenny Arsenault, Buddy Campbell and Paul MacDonald. Of course, the love of the horses just kept growing and growing and growing until finally they did get their own horses and it went from there with those two,” Gail said. Mark was the first one to leave home, heading to Windsor, Ontario to get his start in the business. Mark was also the first to start driving. To date, he has over 6,700 driving wins and nearly $106 million in purse earnings. The Goshen, New York resident started driving in 1997 and his resume is extensive. He has surpassed the $100 million mark, has two O’Brien Awards, three Gold Cup and Saucer victories (2003, 2004, 2011) as well as been a regular on the Grand Circuit and more recently in the New York Sire Stakes. This year he won the $220,000 Sam McKee Memorial on Aug. 3 at The Big M with Larry Stalbaum’s Rocknroll Runa A. “We had nothing else so I decided to go to Windsor and work for Mike MacDonald. He helped me a lot,” Mark said. “They are all first-generation horsemen,” Gail said. “We had a couple of broodmares here, but there were no drivers or trainers [in the family]. When Mark and Anthony went to Ontario and they started with Mike MacDonald and different trainers, they had no family that was feeding them horses, no family that they grew up learning from their dad or their uncle or their grandfather. They are truly first generation. When James landed up there, it was a little different because he had his brothers. He did have a little bit of a harness racing connection where Anthony could say to a trainer, why don’t you try my kid brother? Anthony and Mark did not have that.” Anthony followed Mark out to Windsor shortly after. “My brothers and I grew up just kids before the internet and before computers, baseball all the time or beating the hell out of each other all the time, it was quite the childhood. To see when Mark left home – I’m two years older than Mark – when he left home, I was still at home,” Anthony said. “For him to move from Prince Edward Island to Windsor as a 17-year-old kid moving to somewhere you’ve never been before around people you’ve never known before, that’s a pretty impressive feat in its own right. And I followed a few months later. We ended up going from Windsor to Montreal. As you can imagine, an English kid starting their driving career in a French province, we didn’t usually get the best horses to drive.” Anthony MacDonald has over 3,600 lifetime driving wins and nearly $35 million in earnings. The Guelph, Ont. resident also started driving in 1997. Anthony’s experience in the business extends beyond driving as he developed TheStable.ca. “It was the same as if every track around you was about to close and you had no job whatsoever,” Anthony explained. “It was probably one of the most terrifying things that ever came through. I didn’t have postsecondary education or any other job that I was good at or wanted to do and it was all coming crumbling down. I just got married, we just had a kid, we had a mortgage and a car, it was literally probably the scariest thing I have gone through in my life. We had a rally in Ontario, Canada, downtown Toronto. I spoke and when I was done speaking, the leader of the Conservative Party, asked if I would work with the party, to which I replied, ‘absolutely not’. “That went on for about three months, we had a couple more rallies and I spoke again and the leader of the party now asked me twice more and finally convinced me to run in politics, so for two years I was the candidate for the Conservative Party in an area of 130,000 people to represent them in provincial politics. I knocked on doors and talked to people for two years and I finished second in the election in a field of five politicians. From there, from knocking on all those doors, I realized a lot of people would enjoy horse racing if they thought it was affordable and it wasn’t tied to gambling. These were people that don’t really gamble, they don’t go to the casino, they don’t play cards online, they are just everyday people and I don’t think they realize there is an outlet for entertainment to watch your horse train or watch your horse race. Just to experience horse racing. “I don’t think people in that area understood that, which is disappointing because it was right in the middle of four racetracks – Mohawk, London, Flamboro, and Grand River,” Anthony continued. “So, when I lost the election, I was kind of deflated. I didn’t know what to do. I went back to driving a little bit and at this point, there was a deal starting to be hammered out by the Conservatives and Liberals over horse racing, so there was some light at the end of the tunnel, but not a ton. I said to my wife one night, ‘all those times I talked to people at their door and they told me that horse racing sounds fun and they’d be interested in something like that, but didn’t know it existed, they can’t all be lying. I wonder what would happen if we just got some horses and trained them down and see if people would become partners.’” And so, Anthony and his wife reached out to breeding farms and made a deal that if the yearlings don’t go for what they want at the sale, they will give them an opportunity to train them down and sell shares to people all over, at the time, Ontario. “I didn’t realize how far reaching it would become,” Anthony said. “Blue Chip Farms gave us some horses and some other small breeders gave us some horses and we ended up with 18 or 20 horses and over 40 owners which, at the time, was an incredible number. Fast forward to today and we have over 900 clients in 15 countries and currently, before Lexington or Harrisburg, we have 115 horses and broodmares. It gave people all over the world an opportunity. It opened the door to an entirely different view of horse racing. I think people are aware of what we did and how we did it. Without the work my wife and I put in, most definitely her, it wouldn’t have been possible.” Anthony credits his success with his family and especially his parents. “To look back and to see every aspect of my life and how I got here is truly incredible. It all started with my parents teaching us to work hard. It’s the same things I tell my kids, ‘if you work harder than the people around you, you’re going to be offered opportunities that maybe they wouldn’t.’ That all started in Kingston back in the 80s. To have so many people from one household succeed from a little strip of asphalt. To have all those wins and all this happen from that one household is really amazing.” The youngest of his brothers, James, is closing in on 4,000 career driving wins and $58 million in lifetime earnings. The Guelph, Ont. resident started driving in 2009 and in 2023, he notched his third straight O’Brien Award as the Keith Waples Driver of the Year, with his sights set on number four in 2024.  “James was our youngest,” Gail said. “He wasn’t always interested in the horses. He was around the track, worked in one of the restaurants around the track, but he didn’t at that time have the same passion as the older boys did, Anthony and Mark. He graduated from high school and went into college, decided he was going to go in through marketing and advertising. They send you to do on-the-job training when you do that and his on-the-job training was going to be at Georgian Downs. “We took him up to Georgian Downs and they went on strike so he was up there with no place to work, so Anthony jumps in and says ‘well, they’ll only be a little while so come and work for me’ and that was the end of the story. He didn’t go back, fell in love with the horses. I don’t know what bug bit him when he was in there, but he learned from that point on, he learned all he could from the horses and all the horsemen around him and he is what he is today as a result of that,” Gail added. James’ name tops the standings at Woodbine Mohawk Park once again this season with a 100-win lead. He also tops the Canadian leaderboard by wins and earnings for the season to date. His name can be regularly found at the headlines of winning multiple races on the card, sweeping featured races, and achieving new milestones. This year, he has found great success with Anthony Beaton’s Legendary Hanover, winning the Meadowlands Pace as one of their marquee events. “Winning a signature race at the Big M is incredible,” James said. “It’s the biggest win of my career I would say and I couldn’t be more proud of it. There is no feeling like winning a big race. There’s a lot of pressure going into races like that and it’s just a release of a lot of emotion when you hit the wire first.” James said that he looks up to his brothers and is able to call on them whenever he needs help or advice. “They are definitely the reason I got into the business; always available for help if I need it or advice; always my number one fans no matter how I do. We are fortunate to be a very close family,” James said. Together, the brothers in the bike share nearly $200 million in career driving earnings and over 14,000 wins. “They are so close and it’s so nice to see it,” Gail said. “We’ve always said to them, nobody is closer to you or will have your back better than your brothers. They are very close to one another, always rooting for one another. They’d be the first ones on social media saying ‘look at what he just did’ for whoever it happened to be. We’re very proud of the fact that they are that close and that they all respect and stand up for one another. “But when they moved away, I heard stories after my boys left that I went, ‘you what?!’” Gail laughed, recalling a memory when Anthony and Mark put James in a hockey bag in the middle of a horse field. And while the MacDonald boys still have their fun as brothers, they all echoed the same sentiment that they are a close family and all stick together. “A lot took place for us to get to where we are,” Anthony said. “We were always very proud of one another as brothers and as a family and we always stick up for one another and praise each other. I think that comes from the way that we were raised, my mom and my dad. It’s hard to quantify what they did and how they did it because they raised a family when it was tough. “The way that we grew up, to think that from that household – my brother Mark has won everything, James who is winning everything, and I’ve won a couple of races, too; my brother Bobby is a blacksmith, my other brother Lloyd is a business owner, and Curtis is best at what he does. It’s pretty hard to believe, the population of Kingston, Prince Edward Island when I was a kid and the kids that came out of that house. It’s more so my parents should be proud of what they accomplished. That’s how I feel about that. They did a tremendous job with what they had. “For me to look back at my family and where the boys came from and how my parents were able to pull it off – it truly is amazing,” Anthony concluded.