A professor of Animal Sciences at Colorado State University, Dr. Temple Grandin is a world famous expert in animal behaviour and livestock handling. While renowned for her innovations in the design of handling facilities and improving animal welfare in the livestock industry, Dr. Grandin is perhaps best known for overcoming her personal struggles with autism. She continues to teach and pursue her research while lecturing around the world on autism and livestock handling.

Six-time Olympian and longtime member of Canada’s dressage team, Christilot Boylen of Schomberg, Ontario, announced her retirement from international team dressage competition on July 8, 2020. Christilot Boylen was born in 1947 in Djakarta, Indonesia, and, with her family, moved to Toronto in 1951. According to the Eurodressage website, she bought her first horse at age 10 with savings she earned acting on the children’s TV series The Howdy Doody Show. She trained her first Olympic mount, Bonheur, and at just 17 years of age she received special permission to compete for Canada in the 1964 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo.

2012 Readers' Choice Award Winner - Why does Hickstead deserve to be recognized as one of Canada’s 10 most remarkable horses and people? “Because,” as Henry Swierenga of Smithville, Ontario, succinctly put it, “he was Hickstead.” The legendary stallion became a Canadian icon in 2008 when, with rider Eric Lamaze of Schomberg, Ontario, he won the Individual Gold and Team Silver medals at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

2012 Readers' Choice Award Winner - The word “Remarkable” nicely sums up Somebeachsomehwere, a whirlwind dynamo who took the Canadian harness racing world by storm in 2007 and 2008, and who now looks to pass on his talent to the next generation of Standardbreds. Trainer and part-owner, Brent MacGrath, of Truro, Nova Scotia, calls him simply “the horse of a lifetime.”