Karen Sparks: “It’s about hard work”
By Karen Sparks | Oct 22, 2025
Karen Sparks is the only millennial woman running five-star shows in North America. No one is more surprised than she is. This is her story.
I never imagined having this job.
With my background, you would think that I dreamed of a career in the horse industry. I grew up training under 10-time Olympian Ian Millar. All my closest friends—Amy Millar, Lauren Hunkin, my teammates at Millar Brooke Farm—wanted to be professional riders. We looked up to Beth Underhill and Jill Henselwood and Gail Greenough and my friends were like, “Oh man, I want that.”
But I had these two voices inside me. One was, You’re not good enough. And the other said, You don’t want this job, that’s not the life you want.
So I knew relatively early in my athletic career that I didn’t want to go pro.
I knew I wanted a family and I felt I had a responsibility to our family business. Ironically, the family business is how I ended up here. I kind of fell into horse show management from a real estate perspective.
Wesley Clover Parks is a legacy venue that’s almost 500 acres. It’s federally owned by the National Capital Commission (NCC) and was founded in 1974. The municipality of Nepean, which is now part of Ottawa, was quite wealthy at the time and greenlit a project to develop a campground and equestrian venue that included a riding school; all with the input of local politicians and experts.
They built an incredible venue. From what I’ve heard and all the documentation I’ve found, they did a damn good job with it. It was a vibrant community. They ran a successful and quality riding school, including programs like community sleigh rides, etc. They also got a group together to run a tournament, the Capital Classic, for many years.
I remember showing at that event as a young rider and it was a highlight of my year. They attracted big sponsors, like Tropicana and Toshiba. It felt kind of like an unofficial equestrian festival of the Ottawa area.
Unfortunately, as these things happen—over time—the site was neglected. The riding school had a lot of students, the horses were well taken care of, but the show facility wasn’t where it needed to be. The sand slowly deadened. It became dust and it needed to be brought up to the new standards of the day. The group who had run the Capital Classic faded away. Then a dear friend and supporter of mine, Jay Hayes and his family, ran a two-week show at the facility for a few years, but it really wasn’t possible to run a national level show at the venue in the state it was in.
It was sad, as an equestrian and proud supporter of my community, to watch this legacy venue fade away.
The opportunity to take over the Park appeared in a strange way. It was the idea of a friend, actually. He was well connected politically and knew the city of Ottawa didn’t love running the park as the smaller municipality had. It wasn’t profitable, in fact quite the opposite. He looked closely at the project, with the idea of taking the park private in a partnership model, and was simply dumbstruck at the scale. The scale of the problems! Operationally, infrastructure issues, financial, you name it. He dropped the project pretty quickly, as you can imagine.
A mentor of mine put the bug in my ear that if anyone could take this project on…it was me.
My family runs a golf course and commercial leasing company, so we had in-house expertise to advise me and I had intimate knowledge of the industry. Ian Millar, my dear friend and mentor, always told me I was getting a PhD in equestrianism, well it turned out to serve me well!
It was a long process to actually take over management of the park. The city relinquished the lease with federal government. The Park remains federal land, owned by a crown corporation called the National Capital Commission (NCC). Our group put in a Request for Proposal to the NCC and ultimately won the right to lease the land. I was pregnant with my first of four children while navigating the lengthy process of negotiating our long-term lease of the 475-acre parcel of land.
That’s how we started—with a team of one. Now we have a team of over 100 in the summertime.
The whole idea behind the Wesley Clover Parks project was bringing this land back to the community, creating something vibrant that residents and tourists could use and would bring health benefits to our city and boost economic activity. All while keeping equestrianism at the heart.
Once we had the lease and the idea, the “real” work began. It’s been over 10 years now. Opening the riding school, upgrading the infrastructure, building soccer fields and trails, establishing a show circuit. Now we have a 5* tournament and FEI events in all three Olympic disciplines. I can’t believe how far we’ve come.
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One of the core challenges for a show manager is securing dates. The national equestrian federation assigns the dates a venue can host national and international shows. It’s always a tricky thing, and it’s exacerbated by where we are.
Wesley Clover Parks is right on the border between Quebec and Ontario. The way the rules work in Canada is that they look at the dates within the province. It’s kind of an open schedule now, but it wasn’t always that way.
When we were getting ready to host events, we were a new entrant to the market. We had three very established players with Bromont, Caledon and Angelstone. The last thing they wanted was someone coming in and taking their dates.
So it was a slow move into the industry. We started with two national shows and really concentrated on building those two dates.
I’ll be honest, we had a few battles!
I try to deal with things in a diplomatic way. That’s always my way. However, if it doesn’t work out, it becomes, “Okay, well, we’re going to fight for the dates,” and we did. It’s never easy to have those types of situations, but so far it has worked out for us.
Dates aside, the challenges of running an international event are enormous. I can’t imagine that you will find a show manager anywhere in the world that will disagree with that. There’s revenue and potential for big sponsorship, but the enormity of the costs, the team it takes, and the scale of the operations to run a large-scale horse show is mind-boggling.
This is a tough business and we learned that the hard way.
In 2016, we hosted our first FEI show. It was a two-star. My tournaments manager and I were going over the numbers after what we thought was an incredibly successful show. We had great numbers on the revenue side. Everybody’s congratulating us. Big party. Well done!
We were on this huge high. And when we saw the final numbers it was, “Oh God, we lost how much?!” It was really stressful and a big eye-opener.
At that time, the facility was nowhere near where it needed to be, too. We had many capital projects and the operation that we thought was going to be an enormous success had just failed financially. That was a real low point for us. Like heads in our hands, thinking, How are we going to do this?!
But we met that challenge.
We found a way to build out the site, step by step, to where it needs to be.
One of the proudest moments of my career was the FEI event we ran in August. We ran our first independent five-star show with one of Canada’s biggest brands, RBC behind us. It was a $340,000 USD Grand Prix with four of the world’s top 10 riders on our grass Grand Prix field.
And we ran it on a difficult set of dates. We’re right on the heels of Dublin Horse Show’s 150th anniversary, which you can imagine was a very big deal. All the Irish riders in the world were there. There was another show in Traverse City the week preceding us. And a five-star right after us. I would be lying if I didn’t say I had major concerns about whether the riders were going to show up.
But I was just not going to be bullied out of a five-star date, so I decided to run and the riders showed up. I couldn’t be more proud of how that week went and excited about where we can build from here.
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I don’t think many young women aspire to be show organizers. It’s not what a young rider who loves the sport and loves her horse wants to be when she grows up. They don’t think, Oh man, I’d love to be Karen Sparks or Linda Heathcott or Nancy Southern at Spruce Meadows.
They see Amy Millar and Erynn Ballard and Tiffany Foster and they’re like, “That’s what I want.” And the reality is getting to that level in the sport is incredibly difficult.
I ended up being perfect for this role because I knew I didn’t want to be an athlete. I wanted to be in business and I’m still doing all the things that I love while helping the family business.
That comes with its own set of challenges, of course. I had to figure out what kind of leader I wanted to be and was fortunate to have had great examples, but they were men.
I spent my equestrian career watching Ian and what worked for him. I had the luxury of learning from my dad, Sir Terry Matthews. Early in my career, I felt like I had to adopt their style, that I was failing if I wasn’t doing it their way.
“I had to figure out what kind of leader I wanted to be and was fortunate to have had great examples, but they were men.”
Maybe it’s being a woman in her forties or maybe it’s being a mom, but I have come to realize that it was an absolute luxury and a privilege to learn from them, but I am not them. I’m my own woman and I need to take ideas from the people around me and adapt them to my style. I’ve found I am far more successful doing it that way.
Every woman in a leadership position will have some story where they felt undermined or disrespected. And, of course, I have my own.
When that happens, my philosophy is I consider that their problem, not mine. If you’re the lead, they have to deal with you—you’re the representative. So you can disrespect me all you want, but I’m still here. And I’m still going to fight for the outcome that I’m looking for and I won’t be bullied.
And, for what it’s worth, I did squash that inner critic that told me I wasn’t good enough early in my career. When I started working, I realized, I am good enough. If I had wanted to, I know, without a doubt, that I absolutely would have been successful as a trainer or rider, or frankly anything. I’m honest. I’m hardworking and I would approach that business with integrity, just like I approach this one. Because it’s not about whether it’s a hard job. It’s about hard work.
