For years, Eric Lamaze was the world’s top-ranked show jumper, living an enviable life filled with fancy cars, international travel and adoring fans—the kind of life a person might do anything to protect. Inside the scandal tearing the equestrian world apart
For a handful of high-flying years, Eric Lamaze was the equestrian world’s Great One, a horsey-set Gretzky worshipped for his bold riding style and near telepathic connection with his bay stallion, Hickstead. At the age of 40, after a long string of false starts, the Canadian show jumper finally claimed an individual gold and a team silver at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Lamaze was the world’s top-ranked show jumper in 2009 and again in 2010 and 2011. (Not to be outdone, Hickstead was named best horse at the World Equestrian Games in 2010.) When Lamaze wasn’t competing, he trained young hopefuls who dreamed of becoming the next champion at a barn in Schomberg, north of Toronto, and at his stables in Florida and Belgium.
His headquarters, a four-acre palm tree–studded property, was located in Wellington, Florida, an ultra-wealthy horse hub near West Palm Beach that hosts the three-month-long Winter Equestrian Festival. The compound contained two barns with 16 stalls, an outdoor ring, housing for the staff and a viewing lounge where visitors could gather to watch the riders. It was also the centre of Lamaze’s horse dealing, which he’d taken up to help pay the bills and fund his increasingly voracious appetite for multimillion-dollar mansions and exotic cars. Over the years, Lamaze bought and sold thousands of horses to investors, fellow competitors and families looking to raise the next podium-topping victor. His Olympic wins burnished his reputation as an authority in the field.
But, behind the scenes, whispers about his business—inflated prices, secret commissions, far-from-perfect horses—were growing louder. Between 2010 and 2023, Lamaze was sued more than a dozen times for various reasons, including fraud and breach of contract. He eventually owed various parties millions of dollars. Throughout it all, he remained seemingly untouchable, supported by prominent figures in the sport. It took the biggest scandal of all—his own dubious claims of having brain cancer—to finally bring his empire crashing down.
Show jumping has deep roots in the British aristocracy, a provenance gleamingly evident in its modern-day spit-and-polish dress code: riding hat, dark leather boots, pale breeches, tailored jacket, white collared shirt and riding gloves. The sport is one of three equestrian disciplines in the Olympics—the others are dressage (which involves executing a choreographed sequence of precise movements) and eventing (a mix of dressage, show jumping and cross-country). While chasing foxes over fences in rural England has fallen out of favour, guiding a horse through a meticulously mapped-out and timed obstacle course remains the purview of the rich—or at least the rich adjacent. In an ecosystem where a top horse can cost upward of $1 million, riders are backed by investors, courted by buyers and sellers, and put through their paces by trainers and coaches.
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In most instances, the stereotype of equestrians as privileged trust-funders bears out. Princess Anne famously rode Goodwill, Queen Elizabeth II’s horse, at the Montreal Olympics in 1976. Greek shipping heir and decorated competitor Athina Onassis is the patron of one of the world’s most renowned jumping competitions. Both Bruce Springsteen’s and Michael Bloomberg’s daughters are former members of the US equestrian team, and rival tech scions Jennifer Gates and Eve Jobs competed against each other while based out of neighbouring properties in Wellington.
Eric Lamaze, however, was no rich kid. Born in Montreal in 1968, he had, by all accounts, a challenging childhood. Just how challenging is horse-world lore, and the story shifts depending on whom you ask—lawyers, biographers, family members or Lamaze himself. In one version, he was exposed to cocaine in the womb and born to a mother, Danièle, who struggled with drug addiction. He lived with his maternal grandmother, an alcoholic. His mother went to prison for drug trafficking; she was released when Lamaze was a pre-teen, and he moved in with her. He started experimenting with marijuana, magic mushrooms and LSD, then, later, cocaine. Eventually, a bright spot appeared: a friend of Danièle’s owned a horse barn outside of the city and took Lamaze on as a student.
Everyone agreed: Lamaze had the right build plus the talent and drive to dominate the sport. Within two years, he was winning competitions
In another version, one that appears in a 2023 biography of Lamaze by French sports journalist Kamel Boudra, Lamaze was raised by his maternal grandmother in a tough neighbourhood in Montreal’s north end. His mother worked as a cook on freighters and sent money home so Lamaze, a natural athlete, could take ballet and tennis lessons. When Danièle returned to life on shore, she worked as a bartender in a strip club and spent a few months in jail for credit card fraud. She lavished her son with new clothes and, eventually, a car. Most importantly, she signed him up for riding lessons. (Danièle declined to be interviewed for this piece, but she denied that she took cocaine while pregnant or did time for drug trafficking. She also insisted that her mother was not an alcoholic.)
Lamaze’s teenage years are less murky. He quit school at 14 to pursue the two things he loved: horses and partying. His days were consumed with mucking out stalls, feeding horses, training and competing. At night, he’d go clubbing with friends. His childhood instructor had connected him with top coaches, including US Olympian George Morris (who was later banned from the sport for sexual misconduct) and Roger Deslauriers, the father of world champion Mario Deslauriers. Everyone agreed: Lamaze had the right build—compact and wiry—and the talent and drive to dominate the sport. Within two years, he was winning competitions and earning prize money, sweeping the junior divisions at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair. He moved to southern Ontario to work with two of the country’s top riders, Canadian team member Jay Hayes and Olympian Hugh Graham. When he wasn’t riding, Lamaze helped rich equestrians buy and sell thoroughbreds. He was young, but he had an eye for what made a good horse.
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Through Graham, Lamaze met Eddie Creed, the Toronto retail magnate who headed up his family’s eponymous luxury department store. Creed had attended agricultural college with the intention of becoming a dairy farmer before taking over the family business, and he spent as much time as he could on his 200-acre farm in Schomberg. He made a deal with Lamaze: if the young man cleared out an old barn full of hay on his property, Creed would let him rent it and would throw in the first few months gratis. Lamaze didn’t hesitate. He filled the barn’s stalls with the horses of clients he’d met at Graham’s farm as well as racehorses he’d bought off the track. He trained them to be hunters—a competition where horse and rider jump a course and are judged on their presentation—then sold them for a tidy profit. He named his operation Torrey Pines Stable, after the seaside golf course in California.
By the early 1990s, with his mid-20s looming, Lamaze was itching to reach the next level. He wanted to compete at Grand Prix shows, the most challenging events with the highest jumps and biggest purses. He just needed the right horse. Creed, an enthusiastic investor who joked that he was Lamaze’s surrogate father, bought him an Irish Sport Horse gelding called Cagney for $80,000, and Lamaze quickly earned himself a spot on the Canadian show jumping team. He competed at the Washington International Horse Show’s Nations Cup and at the 1994 World Equestrian Games in the Netherlands, then set his sights on the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Handsome, gregarious and gifted, Lamaze was a turbocharged star racing up the echelons of his sport. It was easy to forget what an unlikely fit he was for this rarefied world.
At different points throughout his life, Lamaze blamed his childhood for the sway drugs held over him. As a teen, he’d managed to balance partying and riding, always prioritizing competing no matter how late he’d been out the night before. The higher he climbed in show jumping, the more cautious he needed to be—aspiring Olympians weren’t allowed to flunk drug tests. But, one night in 1996, Lamaze slipped up. An old friend visited him in Schomberg, and the men started reminiscing about their wilder days. The friend pulled out some cocaine, and that was that. Over the next four months, Lamaze did coke three more times—including the week before the Olympic trials. When his mandatory drug test came back positive, Lamaze, who had made the team, was terrified his dream would be crushed. The Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport banned him from show jumping for four years, a decision Lamaze appealed. Creed introduced him to Tim Danson, an experienced trial and appellate lawyer whose clients included American track star Carl Lewis. In court, Danson highlighted the poverty and drug use Lamaze had experienced in childhood and argued that his cocaine consumption had been recreational, not performance enhancing. If anything, cocaine would be a hindrance during a show jumping event, which requires that the rider remain calm and in control. The adjudicator agreed, noting that Lamaze had already “lived a number of different lives” and that he should be treated as a “youthful first offender.” Still, it was too late for the Olympic hopeful: the ban was overturned after the closing of the Atlanta Games.
Undeterred, Lamaze kept competing, snagging a spot on the Olympic team for a second time in 2000. And, for a second time, he failed a drug test—after taking Advil Cold and Sinus containing pseudoephedrine and a diet supplement containing ephedrine. Now a two-time offender, Lamaze was banned from show jumping for life. Devastated by the decision, he went to a party in Collingwood, drank heavily and did drugs, unaware that the CCES would soon reverse its decision after determining that his use of banned substances had been innocent. When a surprise follow-up test yielded another positive result, this time for cocaine, the rider was once again barred indefinitely. Danson launched another appeal, arguing persuasively that Lamaze’s cocaine use was a stress reaction to being exiled from competition. The ban was eventually overturned, but the Canadian Olympic Association had had enough: Lamaze would not participate in the Sydney Games.
“I wish to apologize to all Canadians for the embarrassment and controversy that I have brought about,” Lamaze said at the time. “I promise that I will make it up to you so that I can proudly represent my country again as an equestrian rider.” For some, his mea culpa was hollow. When Equestrian Canada—the sport’s national governing body—then selected Lamaze to compete at a prestigious event at Calgary’s famed Spruce Meadows, the stadium’s founder, Ron Southern, broadcast his distaste. “It holds both the sport and Canada open to immense ridicule,” he told the CBC. “The message this sends is that you can do this with impunity.”
Fittingly, it took a horse to get Lamaze’s detractors to forgive, if not forget. Lamaze met Hickstead, a Dutch Warmblood, in Belgium in 2004. The stallion was small, full of attitude and headstrong—in many ways, an equine reflection of the show jumper. Lamaze convinced John Fleischhacker, the founder of a medical-parts manufacturing company in Minnesota, to buy the stallion with him. A successful horse-rider match depends, above all, on communication and trust. Every show jumping round is a display of the quality of connection between the two species, and Lamaze and Hickstead were magic. The pair claimed first place and $325,000, at the time the country’s largest purse, at the CN International Grand Prix at Spruce Meadows in 2007. Lamaze was the first Canadian show jumper in 20 years to crack the top 10 in the world rankings and, combined with his other wins, the first North American rider ever to earn more than $1 million in annual prize money.
In 2008, Lamaze had a shot at rewriting his Olympic story. He and Hickstead travelled to Hong Kong for the Beijing Games, where they jumped two clear rounds in individual show jumping, then moved on to a jump-off for gold and silver. When Hickstead leaped over the rails of the final obstacle, the crowd started to roar, and Lamaze glanced back to see the jump still standing. His mouth opened in amazement. Looking around at the fans dressed in red and white—one held a sign that read “Lamazing”—he pointed down at Hickstead, beaming. The Canadians, including equestrian legend Ian Millar, also won silver in the team event. When I asked Lamaze’s teammate Mac Cone about that moment, he said Hickstead understood what was needed of him. Some horses never do, but Hickstead knew he was supposed to run, jump and leave the rails intact. “That’s what he was good at doing,” said Cone, “and Eric’s the one who figured it out.”
Lamaze was the best rider in the world and, arguably, the most beloved. As Mark Laskin, a former technical adviser for Canada’s show jumping team, put it to me, he had “rock-star charisma.” Over the next three years, Lamaze and Hickstead travelled the globe together, dominating at competitions in Florida, Brazil, France, Switzerland and Germany as well as at the Royal in Toronto, winning a combined $3.7 million. The money was flowing, Lamaze’s riding had never been better, and an entire country had fallen for him and his horse. His redemption arc was complete.
Many top riders don’t own their horses, at least not fully. Horses—especially Grand Prix show jumpers—are prohibitively expensive. Typically, elite horses are purchased by wealthy investors, either themselves amateur riders or simply lovers of the sport. The rider competes at shows, and the owner collects the majority of the winnings. Good performances drive up a horse’s value. When the animal is sold, it’s the owners who profit.
Not all professional riders help buy and sell horses, but for the ones who do, it’s often their biggest revenue stream. Sourcing a talented jumper and brokering a deal for a prospective buyer can bring in a hefty commission. For a $400,000 horse, for instance, 10 per cent is standard. Commissions are often secretive, however, leading to possible double dipping. A broker might demand a fee from the seller that the seller then tacks onto the horse’s final sale price—unbeknownst to the buyer, who is already paying a commission to the broker.
Coaching young riders and buying and selling horses were part of Torrey Pines’ business model since the beginning, and both enterprises grew exponentially. It was Lamaze’s reputation and expertise that drew Karina Aziz to him. A 17-year-old equestrian from Hamilton, she’d been riding and competing in the hunter ring for several years and desperately wanted to start show jumping. She was looking for horses with experience—and money was no object. Her father, Gregory Aziz, was CEO at National Steel Car, one of the largest railcar manufacturers in North America. He’d bought a farm in Caledon and built a stable, christened Iron Horse Farm, for his daughter. Karina’s coach, Canadian show jumper Ainsley Vince, suggested that the family head over to Torrey Pines to find the perfect fit.
Between 2004 and 2008, Gregory bought nine horses from Lamaze, spending nearly $3 million. Rominka, a Belgian Warmblood mare, cost $350,000. According to the Azizes, Lamaze told them she could clear 1.4-metre-high fences, just 25 centimetres shy of the highest obstacle in the Olympics. But, when Karina rode Rominka, the mare refused smaller fences, causing the young woman to fall multiple times. Karina says both Lamaze and Vince blamed her lack of skill, but when Vince tried riding Rominka, the horse wouldn’t jump for her either. A little more than a year after the Azizes purchased Rominka, Lamaze agreed to take back the mare and, Gregory claims, reimburse them or provide a replacement (promises Lamaze denies making).
Rominka wasn’t the only problem: a month after they bought Peppercorn, a $372,000 mare, she went lame. The family was disenchanted with Torrey Pines but nevertheless purchased two more horses from Lamaze. “We believed what we were being told—we thought we were with the best,” Karina says. The Azizes spent two years trying to recover their money until, in 2010, they sued, alleging that Lamaze had never made good on his financial commitments regarding Rominka. They also claimed he’d misrepresented Peppercorn. Horses competing internationally must be microchipped and are required to have a passport; the Azizes found out that the mare had two of each. The older chip identified the horse’s name as Roman, and further digging uncovered a history of poor performances in Europe.
The lawsuit didn’t seem to faze Lamaze. He was at the height of his career and in high demand as a coach and horse dealer—one disgruntled buyer wouldn’t change that. The one thing that would, and that Lamaze never predicted, happened on a course in Italy in November of 2011. After the last fence, as he and Hickstead headed out of the arena, the stallion suddenly leaned back, then collapsed. Lamaze dismounted and watched in horror as his partner writhed on the ground. Though vets tried to revive him, Hickstead died within minutes, the victim of an aortic rupture. At a press conference three days later, a despondent Lamaze told reporters how special Hickstead was to him, adding, “What these horses do for us is incredible. They become part of our family. They really change our life.” Lamaze tried to drink the pain away, to no avail. He confided in a few people that he didn’t want to ride anymore—but he couldn’t afford not to. Like many of his Wellington neighbours, Lamaze had a reputation for living large: he tooled around town in Lamborghinis, Porsches and Mercedes and occupied a succession of palatial homes. Working was the only way Lamaze could maintain his high-roller lifestyle.
Over the years, Lamaze had nurtured partnerships with several wealthy horse lovers. Andy and Carlene Ziegler, a Wisconsin couple who founded a global investment management company called Artisan Partners, bought more than a dozen horses for Lamaze to ride. After Hickstead’s death, they let him use a farm they’d bought in Belgium as a European base for Torrey Pines. It was with one of the Zieglers’ horses, Fine Lady 5, that Lamaze won another Olympic medal, in Rio in 2016.
With that bronze, Lamaze became Canada’s most decorated equestrian, and he didn’t intend to stop there. He had his eye on a new horse—a Belgian Warmblood mare named Jewel 8. His goal was to compete with her at five-star Grand Prix competitions, then bring her to the Tokyo Games in 2020. But there was no way he could afford her nearly $2-million price tag on his own. He approached a few people, including Robert and Sandra Mockoviak, who worked in the pharmaceutical industry and had previously invested in horses for prominent American show jumpers. Lamaze had cared for their Grand Prix horse in Belgium, and they’d grown to trust him, so they kicked in $280,000 toward Jewel 8’s purchase. Lamaze was ecstatic. In March of 2017, he announced the purchase on his Facebook page, and he competed with Jewel 8 throughout Europe that spring and summer. He sent the Mockoviaks regular updates about his newest top horse—until December, when all communication suddenly stopped.
Lamaze had been feeling dizzy throughout the fall but wrote it off as fatigue. A friend finally convinced him to see a doctor. Lamaze’s statements, like many of the health details he shared in personal conversations, with the media or in court documents, were at times hard to follow and difficult to believe. According to an affidavit later filed in the Aziz lawsuit, Lamaze claimed to have received a diagnosis of glioblastoma—a fast-growing brain tumour that has an average survival range of 12 to 18 months—and immediately started treatment. But, rather than hit pause, he kept the diagnosis quiet and continued competing, closing out 2017 with events in Qatar, Paris and Geneva. Throughout the following year, Lamaze criss-crossed North America and Europe for events, showing up at Spruce Meadows in June and winning events on three consecutive days. He competed for the last time that year in late September, then announced that he was dealing with “health concerns” and took a couple of months off.
“What most people did not know or see is that after Eric rode a 90-second course, he paid a very steep price,” wrote a member of Lamaze’s legal team in the affidavit. Lamaze was allegedly sick for days or even weeks each time he competed—the balance, strength and coordination required for him to do his job was draining. He had withered to 83 pounds, was slurring his words, and couldn’t breathe or walk properly. The private doctors who were trying experimental treatments with him in Europe reportedly said he was near death, then put forward a specious remedy: Lamaze should get out of bed and march up and down the stairs to raise his heart rate and increase oxygen flow to his brain. Afterward, they administered “powerful drugs,” according to the affidavit, through an IV. Following just one month of these treatments, the patient started inching back from the brink.
It was around this time that Swiss show jumper Steve Guerdat got in touch with Lamaze about a visit to Belgium. When Lamaze had told his friend that he had brain cancer, Guerdat was shocked. But, if anyone could get through that ordeal, Guerdat thought, it was Lamaze. Upon arriving in Belgium, Guerdat picked up Lamaze at his apartment to take him out for lunch. Lamaze, Guerdat told me, was much thinner than usual, and his skin had a yellow tinge to it. Within 15 minutes of being at the restaurant, Lamaze asked to be taken home—he couldn’t eat. After dropping him off, Guerdat called his wife crying, thinking he’d said goodbye to his friend for the last time.
At a courthouse in Milton, the Aziz family’s lawsuit was creeping along at a glacial pace, almost a decade after it was launched. For two years, the Azizes’ lawyers, Jerome Morse and David Trafford, had been trying to schedule a time for Lamaze to be questioned under oath in advance of a trial date. In January of 2019, Tim Danson, Lamaze’s lawyer, told Morse and Trafford that Lamaze was unable to travel to Canada for questioning—he was apparently “gravely ill” and receiving “heavy chemotherapy treatment” and blood transfusions in Europe. After visiting Torrey Pines’ Facebook page and watching a video of Lamaze competing weeks earlier, the Azizes’ lawyers were skeptical. So they hired a private investigator, who travelled to Florida and watched Lamaze compete—and win. As Morse later told me, “It’s hard to understand how somebody on their deathbed could be competing at the highest level of jumping.” Over the next two months, Lamaze went on to ride in Miami, Belgium, England and France.
Meanwhile, another lawsuit—a much faster-moving one—was wrapping up in Florida. After a year of little to no communication about Jewel 8, the Mockoviaks learned that Lamaze had sold the horse to a Canadian rider he coached. They sued him in Palm Beach circuit court, alleging, among other things, fraud. In June, a judge ruled that Lamaze owed the Mockoviaks treble damages—three times the amount of actual damages—which came to $845,000. Around the same time, Lamaze revealed his brain-cancer diagnosis in a French media interview: “It took me a very long time to be able to discuss it with the people around me,” he said. Fans and colleagues rallied around him. He won multiple events at Spruce Meadows that month, including the prestigious RBC Grand Prix of Canada. At a press conference afterward, Lamaze wore a ball cap atop his bald head, a five-o’clock shadow and a smile—the last time he’d won this event was with Hickstead.
The acrimonious lawsuits with former investors did little to discourage Lamaze from further leveraging his relationships. In March of 2020, as Covid was sweeping across North America, he announced a new partnership with Mark Rein—the Toronto-born co-founder of Epic Games, the video game company that developed Fortnite—and his wife, Tara Dow-Rein. He’d met the couple 30 years earlier, when they started investing in high-performance horses. Over the next few months, the Reins bought 10 horses for Lamaze. The show jumper also approached his long-time friend Muffie Guthrie and her husband, Jeffrey Brandmaier, owners of a hunter barn called Knightwood Stables, near Guelph. Guthrie’s lawyer father had represented Lamaze in the past, and her mother had invested in horses with him—they were like family. Lamaze had two proposals: he wanted the couple to buy a $460,000 mare named Newberry Balia NL for him to compete with, and he wanted the three of them to go 50-50 on another mare, Nikka VD Bisschop, who cost $784,000. They’d all make a profit down the road when they sold the horses, he said. Guthrie and Brandmaier agreed to both proposals and transferred Lamaze the money.
When the pandemic hit Florida hard, Lamaze said his European doctors urged him to return to Belgium, where stricter health protocols were in place. After landing in Brussels in mid-March, he apparently received a diagnosis for a blood infection—said to be treated with two transfusions—and kidney failure. In a video interview a few weeks later with an Iranian show jumper, Lamaze had miraculous news: his brain tumour had disappeared, he said, but his organs had taken a beating from the chemo, and his kidneys had begun releasing toxins. His physician, he claimed, had suggested an artificial kidney, a device that has not yet undergone clinical trials.
Sometime around August of 2020, Lamaze claimed he had surgery to remove what was left of the supposedly vanished tumour and to vacuum dry blood out of his brain. Against his doctors’ advice, he then competed in Germany, a bandage visible underneath his helmet. When he posted about the show on Facebook, fans left reams of comments commending his courage. By the end of that year, however, Lamaze’s health seemed to have deteriorated further. At a medical centre in West Palm Beach, Lamaze claimed, doctors told him his kidneys had shut down and his blood levels were dangerously low. They gave him transfusions, but he said they told him he was likely hours from death. Lamaze left the hospital because he wanted to die at home—he’d just signed a $42,000-a-month lease for a unit on the 44th floor of a condo complex overlooking Biscayne Bay in Miami. But Lamaze didn’t die that night. Or the next. After a week or two, he even began to feel better. And by January of 2021, he was in Wellington, winning a Grand Prix event.
The frantic merry-go-round of show jumping events, alleged medical procedures and horse dealing continued over the next year. Lamaze convinced Guthrie and Brandmaier to sell their half of Nikka to the Reins for $740,000—a substantial profit—by offering to split his share of the mare with them. Satisfied with retaining 25 per cent of a horse likely to continue increasing in value, they agreed. The Reins paid Lamaze—but he never passed along the money to Guthrie and Brandmaier. A few months later, according to Lamaze, his doctors discovered that his brain was bleeding from the trauma of landing jumps. While they prepared for a complicated surgery, Lamaze claimed he was ordered to stay in bed for 22 hours a day and told he would never jump again. Discouraged, he announced that he was taking a sabbatical from the sport. His friend and fellow Canadian show jumper Beth Underhill would be riding Torrey Pines’ top horses going forward.
Lamaze, however, was still in charge of the deals. He sold an additional 45 per cent stake in Nikka to the Reins for $3.2 million—without getting Guthrie and Brandmaier’s sign-off. When Guthrie found out, she texted Lamaze. She said she knew he was fighting a very hard battle with cancer—one that Brandmaier was waging too. (Brandmaier died in December of 2024.) Nevertheless, she wanted clarity on the sale. He replied to Guthrie’s message by saying that the proceeds from the sale already “went to a huge hospital bill” and five horses sure to help him recoup some of his expenses. With more and more legal complaints being lodged against Lamaze, his alleged illness was starting to seem like an all-too-convenient cover. He went on to suggest that he owed Guthrie just $560,000 instead of the nearly $2 million she was insisting on. Shocked, Guthrie proposed a payment plan instead. Lamaze made it clear that he wouldn’t pay her the full amount, but he could give her “half of a great horse” to make up some of the difference. He ended by saying he loved her and her parents, then sent along $140,000. The Reins continued to support Torrey Pines, purchasing five more horses, but Guthrie and Brandmaier were done. After discovering that Lamaze had inflated the prices of both Newberry and Nikka—each horse had cost roughly $145,000 less than he’d told them—the couple sued Lamaze for $1.97 million.
Guthrie and Brandmaier, the Mockoviaks, and the Aziz family weren’t the only ones to accuse Lamaze of shady dealings. He faced other legal actions in Florida and Ontario—in at least one of the Florida cases, the lawsuit was dismissed because the plaintiffs couldn’t locate Lamaze to serve him, despite trying for seven months. He’d also been sued for unpaid legal fees, unpaid rent on his Miami apartment and an unpaid American Express platinum credit card bill.
In the sports world, however, the repeat Olympian hadn’t lost his sheen. Lamaze and Hickstead were inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame, and the show jumper received the Order of Sport, the country’s highest honour. Equestrian Canada appointed Lamaze technical adviser for the national show jumping team, a position that involves attending international shows and overseeing athlete development. It typically also includes the job of chef d’équipe, a multifaceted role that encompasses mentorship, coaching and logistics. Presented with a new career path, Lamaze announced his retirement from show jumping in March of 2022. “There’s a part of me that feels really upset that I’ve been battling cancer with the hope of riding again, and I’m crushed that that won’t be the case,” he said in a statement.
In the dozen or so years since the Aziz family sued Lamaze, Karina had moved to the Netherlands, bought a horse farm and gotten married. She continued riding, competing in Grand Prix events across Europe and in Florida. But she avoided Canada, where she felt judged by other riders for pursuing legal action against a national icon. The dirty looks and cold shoulders at shows were enough to make her consider dropping the suit—it was demoralizing to seek justice against someone so idolized—but the Azizes had the deep pockets to see this fight through.
Things escalated even further when Peppercorn’s daughter went lame in 2022, and Karina learned that the horse had laminitis, a painful inflammatory condition that affects a horse’s hooves. It’s also a condition for which a horse’s genetic background can be a risk factor. Karina’s vet in the Netherlands offered to do a neurectomy, a surgery to remove nerves in the horse’s feet. Typically a last resort, neurectomies are a hard no for the Fédération Équestre Internationale, the international governing body for the sport: any horse that has had the surgery is prohibited from competing in FEI shows, so Karina would have to surrender the mare’s passport. Karina thought of how Peppercorn had gone lame and the oddity of her two passports. The Aziz family still owned the older mare, so Karina asked her vet in Ontario to check for signs of a neurectomy. After shaving the back of the horse’s legs, the vet found a mark on her right foot that strongly suggested she’d undergone the procedure. With this discovery, Karina amended her lawsuit, alleging that Lamaze had knowingly sold her a horse that had been neurectomized. Then, in 2023, she got the news she’d waited so long to hear: Lamaze’s Ontario trial would begin in September.
In the months leading up to the trial, Danson sought an adjournment, telling the court that Lamaze was too sick to participate. The brain cancer had spread to his throat, Danson said, and he had to undergo emergency surgery. When I spoke with Danson this past December, he told me that after Lamaze had the supposed surgery, Danson stressed the need for a medical report. “If you’re ill and it’s legitimate and you have a doctor’s report, no one is going to object to an adjournment,” he said. Danson ultimately received the required documents and, in July, filed a first letter. Written in Dutch and signed by a Dr. Nordeyn Oulad Taib of the Chirec Cancer Institute in Belgium, it stated that Lamaze had glioblastoma. A second letter, this one undated and with an illegible signature, said that Lamaze was to have a craniotomy. In August, Danson filed another letter—purportedly from a Chirec Cancer Institute neurosurgeon named Benoit Pirotte. It stated that Lamaze had laryngeal throat cancer and that, while he’d undergone one surgery to remove parts of the tumour, he would need a second procedure.
Danson stepped down as Lamaze’s lawyer, telling the court that his client was “very sick, but maybe not with cancer”
Karina was immediately suspicious. The letters had typos in them, and all it took was a quick Google search to discover that the last name of the doctor who had signed the glioblastoma letter was incorrect—it should have been Oulad Ben Taib. She hired a Belgian private detective to investigate further, and Chirec promptly confirmed that the letters were forgeries: Oulad Ben Taib didn’t speak Dutch, and Pirotte had no memory of Lamaze. When the Azizes’ lawyers presented their findings to Justice Marvin Kurz, he dismissed the bid for an adjournment: “I cannot find any of the evidence that Mr. Lamaze relies upon…to be either credible or reliable.” Kurz ordered Lamaze to pay the Azizes’ legal fees for his adjournment motion, a total of $32,400.
Talking to me about that day in court, Danson said he felt like he’d “been hit by a Mack truck.” He’d considered Lamaze family; Danson had been the best man at Lamaze’s 2001 wedding, to an American equestrian from whom he’d since split. He told me he couldn’t believe that Lamaze would have lied to him. So Danson stepped down as his lawyer, telling the court that Lamaze was “very sick, but maybe not with cancer.”
The forged letters, also filed by Lamaze in a Court of Arbitration for Sport hearing, led the FEI to determine that Lamaze had violated an anti-doping rule by submitting fabricated medical documents, which qualifies as tampering. As a result, the FEI banned Lamaze from both competing and coaching professionally until 2027.
In Florida, Lamaze’s lawyer in the Guthrie case relayed the same laryngectomy and brain surgery story. He also filed a letter, purportedly from Chirec, before finding out that it was fake. At a September 2023 hearing in Palm Beach County, Lamaze blamed the forgeries on his bookkeeper; she had produced the letters without telling him, he said. He admitted that he didn’t need a craniotomy in 2023 because his brain cancer was gone but maintained that he did have throat cancer that summer and had to undergo two surgeries. “I am very sorry, but this was not made to create or to hide or to do anything to the court,” he said, adding that his bank accounts were frozen and he could barely feed himself and his horses. The judge was unconvinced, calling the letters “deliberate, complete and major acts of fraud.” She struck Lamaze’s pleadings and, in November of 2023, ordered him to pay Guthrie and Brandmaier $1.97 million—a decision Lamaze has appealed. The Reins have since also sued Lamaze, saying they didn’t know that Guthrie and Brandmaier hadn’t consented to Nikka’s sale and alleging that he’d inflated the prices of five horses they bought for Torrey Pines. (A trial date has yet to be set.)
When Lamaze neglected to pay the Azizes’ legal fees, Justice Kurz struck his statement of defence—meaning Lamaze was no longer entitled to defend himself against the allegations. In August of 2024, he was ordered to pay the Azizes $807,000, plus another $104,134 for their legal fees. When Karina heard the news, she cried. Going up against one of the most prominent figures in the horse world had weighed heavily on her, and she was glad it was over.
This past October, Lamaze released a rambling 2,000-word statement through a French media-relations firm. In it, he expressed “a great deal of sadness…for seeing my reputation tarnished after a dreamlike career.” He took aim at the Aziz family, calling Karina a bad rider and insisting that Peppercorn had never had a neurectomy. He maintained that a tumour had made him very sick (“I’d like to make it clear I’m in no way a malingerer”) and that his illness had prevented him from fighting the allegations in court.
When I reached out to Lamaze for an interview, he declined to say much other than to warn me against reporting gossip. He maintained that he would be redeemed. According to the show jumper, he received a diagnosis of brain cancer in 2017; he has credited experimental medicine and a will to live for his longevity. If Lamaze did indeed have glioblastoma, he has survived incredible odds: the average five-year survival rate is less than seven per cent.
Though inconclusive, there is evidence that Lamaze was at times unwell over the past few years. A couple of his friends and colleagues whom I spoke with, including Steve Guerdat, witnessed physical manifestations of illness such as vomiting and weight loss. In photos and videos from certain competitions, he looks exhausted and dazed. “There’s no doubt that he was sick,” Danson told me, then wondered aloud if Lamaze’s history of drug use had come back to haunt him—it would explain his bizarre behaviour, Danson said. “If it’s not cancer, what is it?”
Over the course of reporting this story, I reached out to dozens of people who have known Lamaze throughout his life: grooms, horse owners and riders, students, business partners, former romantic partners, friends, family. Most were reluctant to talk. I suspect that, for some, the silence is out of loyalty, a lingering respect for a man who was once one of the best riders in the world. Others don’t wish to expose their business dealings with Lamaze to public scrutiny and risk embarrassment for having been duped. When I asked Olympian Mac Cone about Lamaze’s troubles, he declined to comment on anything but their time riding together. “It’s just flat out none of my business,” he said. “He was a great teammate. I’ll always remember him for that.” Lamaze’s mother told me he hadn’t spoken to her in four years, but that hasn’t changed her feelings toward him: “I love him; he’s my son.”
For his fans, the saga is sad and unsettling. He was a Canadian hero, an underdog who clawed his way to glory in an elitist sport. They cheered for him at shows, grieved with him when Hickstead died, prayed for him when he appeared near death himself. That he’s not who they thought he was—who they wanted him to be—feels like a betrayal. Lamaze, though, says he’s the one who has been betrayed. He claims his medical records are subject to a confidentiality agreement with his European doctors until 2027, at which time the details of his treatment will be revealed. He says a documentary series that will vindicate him is in the works. As he tells it, he has one more redemption arc to come.
This story appears in the February 2025 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.
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