Page 84 - December2022

Rod
Lowe
Photo provided by Rod Lowe
by Diane Rice
Rod Lowe grew up in Billings, Montana, playing sports: football,
basketball, and wrestling. It was
his brother who loved horses. “We lived in
a subdivision area and around eighth grade, my dad wanted cows and my brother wanted horses, so we moved farther out of town,” Rod says. “I was miserable! I didn’t have all my subdivision friends to play with and all the stuff I wanted to do; I couldn’t do anymore
until I learned to drive. So, I grew up around horses, but they weren’t my passion.”
That all changed after attending college
in Oregon, then moving back to Montana, which led to the familiar progression of buying a yearling, training it, buying property, breeding, boarding, and racing. Since then, Rod has become a driving force in raising Oregon horse racing from the ashes— not once, but twice.
“He’s been kind of the savior of Southern Oregon horse racing at Grants Pass for many years,” says Dave Nelson, an Oregon Quarter Horse Racing Association (OQHRA) board member. “He’s been instrumental in figuring out ways of helping not only the fairgrounds at Grants Pass, but the race meet there
as well. He has now taken on the general managership of the Horsemen’s Racing Association, LLC [HRA], formed after
82 SPEEDHORSE December 2022