TDN Weekend December 2016 Issue 9
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/974613
sire to do something a little bit different, to accept a new challenge. I have confidence that he knows what he is doing. He talks to the right people, he has the right people that he can consult with and I have the con- fidence that he has done his homework." Cumberland, Maine is not exactly a hot bed of horse racing, but it does have a fair with harness racing. Growing up in the town and with his grandfather and father owning a couple of slow horses, Adam couldn't get enough of the place. He particularly liked the interaction with the horses, even if that meant mucking out stalls for his grandfa- ther. "It came later, when I was about 19 and we were at the fair, betting," he said. "I was sit- ting there in the stands and thought, 'You know what, this is what I want to do.'" At the time he was in college and work- ing toward a biology degree. It was shortly after that epiphany at the Cumberland Fair that he went to Pennsylvania to work for Hanover. There was no turning back. Chris Bowden had hit it big when he founded a company called SHP Acquisitions, which specializes in the subsidized housing industry. When his son came to him with a vision of building a Standardbred breeding operation, he was willing to open his check- book because he knew Adam had the pas- sion and the work ethic. "It was the passion he showed for the sport and the fact he spent so much of his free time studying it," Chris Bowden said. "That's really what convinced me. I had told all of my kids that I will support any busi- ness venture that they're interested in if they have three things–one is if they show me a passion for whatever it is they are do- ing; two is that they are willing to work very hard, and he had the willingness to work day and night to do it; three is that you have to have a business plan. He put to- gether a business plan that made sense to me and we worked on it and revised it over an extended period of time. He put a lot of effort and thought into what he wanted to accomplish." So the father and his 24-year-old son, basi- cally newcomers to the sport, showed up at the Standardbred sales in 2005 with the in- tention of buying some mares. They thought they'd probably buy five. It wound up being 20.