Hastings Racecourse legend Dan Jukich picks up the pieces

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It was Palm Sunday morning, March 29, when the voice of horse racing in B.C. went silent.

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A hint of tears crept into his eyes. He was trying to speak, but no words were coming out of a quivering mouth as he stood outside the fence of the paddock enclosure at Hastings Racecourse in Vancouver.

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Dan Jukich, Honoured Member of the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame, was doing what he has done for the past 36 years: helping a friend at the track.

The timing was different on this occasion. He had been told earlier in the week by Great Canadian Entertainment that his services would no longer be needed as of March 30. He knew it was coming, but just not when.

With Great Canadian not renewing its lease at Hastings Racecourse and without any financial assistance forthcoming from the provincial government, the longest-running sport in B.C., dating back 136 years, was left looking at a sudden finish line.

For the past couple of months, Jukich was assigned the difficult task of being the point man to assist the horse people with collecting equipment and personal belongings from their barns prior to a mass invasion of a backstretch cleanup crew.

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After attending church service Sunday, Dan ventured over to Hastings, his second home, for a final day’s work. His first appointment was with Scott Ackles, son of Bob, the legendary football executive of B.C. Lions fame who passed away suddenly at 69 after suffering a heart attack in July 2008.

Scott was at Hastings to save the miniature jockey statue in memory of his father that had stood in the paddock enclosure for years. He and his cousin Geoff Pegg, a long-time horseman, were there to lift the 220-pound statue into the back of Scott’s vehicle. It will eventually find a home in a newly planned B.C. Football Hall of Fame in Surrey.

Born in Sarnia, Ont., Bob’s family moved west in 1952 and lived in East Vancouver where he played hockey, rugby and football as a kid. Bob loved telling the story about how he and his buddies would sneak into the racetrack to pick up discarded mutuel tickets hoping to find “a live one” to pocket some cash.

“I looked at his statue every day on my way from the racing office to the broadcast booth,” Jukich said. “It showcased his life-long motto: ‘Be the best that you can be’. They were words that inspired me every time I walked by it.”

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Jukich was just a toddler when his father took him on a tour of the backstretch at Hastings. The late Roy Jukich Sr. knew his way around the grounds because horse racing was one of the many beats he covered as a principled and straightforward sports reporter for The Vancouver Sun in the 1960s.

Dan was seven years old when his dad introduced him to track announcer Jack Short, who asked the wide-eyed youngster what he wanted to do when he grew up. “I told him I wanted his job,” Dan recalls.

Whoever thought he would one day be joining Jack Short in the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame decades after that first meeting?

And whoever thought so many years later Dan Jukich and Scott Ackles would be swapping heartwarming stories about their respective fathers under such melancholy circumstances at Hastings Racecourse this past Sunday morning.

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