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“We’re still negotiating,” he said, hoping Northlands could arrange to create new festival grounds alongside the track.

“We’d like to stay here for as long as they’ll have us because this is where we’ve always raced.”

Sinclair isn’t as hopeful.

“I’m a person that says never say never, so (there’s) still potential, but realistically this is probably the last year,” he said.

Cone has been going to the Northlands track for 66 years, ever since his dad brought him to his first race when he was four.

Today, he’s one of about 100 full-time trainers, managing a staff of 11 and training 30 of roughly 750 horses.

Cone starts training all of his horses by February for the May start to the racing season at Northlands.

“There’s no set routine to get a horse ready for a race, we treat them all as individuals,” he said.

The day of a race there’s a lot of preparation. Feed and water are reduced so the horses aren’t running on full stomachs. Some are put in ice baths to help reduce inflammation, others are covered with magnetic pulse blankets to relax their muscles. The post-race feast comes later.

Photo by Bloom, David / Postmedia

The noise that drifts over from the festival grounds during K-Days doesn’t seem to affect the horses, even during a race, Cone said.

“It’s amazing what these horses … put up with because they’re very sensitive animals.”

While most of the horses are fine with the fireworks that mark the end of each day during K-Days, some of the young ones get agitated.

Horses are more sensitive to noise when they can’t see where it’s coming from. The barn doors are left open on the first night so they can see what’s causing the cracks and bangs, Cone said, adding they always have staff in the barns overnight.