From an internment camp to the Winner's Circle, Okihiro has scored big in life

From an internment camp in the B.C. interior, to a stakes winner at Woodbine, Rick Okihiro has lived an incredible life

By Steve Buffery

To a great many hockey families in the Mississauga area, Rick Okihiro is the friendly guy who operates the pro shop at the Paramount Fine Foods Centre, formerly known as the Hershey Centre.

Ask any hockey mom or dad: Who is one of the best skate sharpeners in all of the GTHA? And the answer, quite frequently, is: “Rick Okihiro.”

Okihiro is pretty well a legend in west end hockey circles. As a young boy, Rick and his brother Chico started sharpening skates at venerable Long Branch Arena before Rick moved on to Cawthra Arena in Mississauga for close to 50 years and then, a few years back, to Paramount.

Okihiro sharpened skates as a teenager, right through Teacher’s College, during his career as a shop teacher at various Toronto schools, and well after his retirement from teaching in 2000. To this day, you can still find the amiable Mississauga resident working at the Paramount Centre during the hockey season.

“It pays for the horses,” he said with a laugh, over breakfast at an Etobicoke restaurant.

Two things have been constants in Rick’s life over the years. Sports – namely hockey – and horse racing. A former Jr. B player with the Lakeshore Bruins (he played with future NHL great Ken Hodge), Okihiro has steadfastly remained involved in hockey  - starting as a standout forward, then as a coach at the AAA level (taking an Etobicoke team to the world-renowned Quebec International Pee-Wee Hockey Tournament) and finally operating pro shops.

Okihiro has also been involved in thoroughbred horse racing as an owner, co-owner and breeder for close to 40 years - throughout his teaching career and afterwards - winning his first race at Woodbine in 1979 with Hasty Regal. Once, as a reward for helping to name his horse Lazer Art, Okihiro took his class to the horse’s first race at Woodbine.

“I gave them all $2 to bet on any horse they wanted. It was like a picnic. It was great,” he said, though, as it turned out, the school's principal wasn’t thrilled with that particular class excursion.

“He thought I was teaching the kids how to gamble,” Okihiro said.

With no background in the sport, Okihiro kind of fell into horse racing as a young man.

“I met a guy, a broken-down trainer, who said: ‘I got a mare in foal, a thoroughbred. Do you want it?’ I said, ‘I’ll buy it. How much do you want for it?’ And he said, ‘give me $100.’

Okihiro later sold the horse but by then, he had caught the bug. Over the years, he’s owned and co-owned some very nice thoroughbreds, including the dark brown gelding Grecian’s Rebel, a winner of eight races and over $300,000 in earnings and the chestnut horse Silky Jr., a winner of nine races at Fort Erie and Greenwood. Today, Okihiro owns – along with trainer Beverley Chubb, Greg Secko and Tim Orlando – the four-year-old gelding Dark Screen, a winner of four races, including the 2025 Lake Superior Stakes at Woodbine – Okihiro’s first stakes score as an owner.  He also owns Kasumi’s Ghost. Kasumi’s Ghost is trained by Bev Chubb. The promising three-year-old - whom Okihiro calls “my Plate filly” - is the daughter of the multi-graded Stakes and Queen’s Plate winner Shaman Ghost, a winner of close to $4,000,000 in his career.

Of course, the life of an owner has its peaks and valleys, which Okihiro is all too familiar with. But at 84, has no plans to stop.

“Winning a race is better than a …….” Okihiro said with a laugh. “But you gotta stick by it. And if you have a win, it carries the momentum for another, maybe, half year.”

Okihiro’s life story is a fascinating one and offers proof that not all thoroughbred owners come from privileged backgrounds. Rick was born in New Westminster, B.C. and when he was just five weeks old, the Okihiros, and other Japanese-Canadian families on the west coast, were declared to be “enemy aliens” by the Canadian government and forced to relocate to internment camps following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1941 even though the vast majority remained loyal Canadians. Many of the families lost their homes and businesses and received very little compensation in return. Okihiro’s daughter, Lara Jean Okihiro, along with her cousin Janis Bridger, wrote an incredible book about the experience called Obaasan’s Boots, published by Second Story Press. The Okihiro family ended up at an internment facility in the small interior B.C. mountain town of Kaslo, before relocating to Toronto after the war. Okihiro grew up in Alderwood, where he played hockey and lacrosse. As a boy, he sold newspapers at the old Long Branch Racetrack – his initial foray into the world of horse racing.

Given his tough beginnings, Okihiro looks back at his life with well-deserved pride, expressing immense satisfaction in his teaching career, his life in horse racing and hockey and, most of all, in his family.  

He couldn’t ask for much more, though a King’s Plate win would be nice.