As a boy growing up in Ottawa, all he wanted to be was a cowboy. It was the Stampede pennant that his aunt brought him from Calgary when he was only four years old, the one that still hung on his wall during his university days, that kept Mike O’Connor’s dream alive.

Elected to the Stampede’s board of directors in March, Mike is an experienced business executive and entrepreneur with a strong background in corporate governance, strategic planning, environmental stewardship and engineering. He has spent the last 30 years providing common sense solutions to challenging environmental problems in Canada and around the world, and is one of only a few people who has qualified for triple registration as a professional engineer, geoscientist and geophysicist.

“I’m absolutely delighted to be involved with the Calgary Stampede at this level,” said O’Connor. “I loved being a volunteer with Stampede agriculture for the last 10 years, but being elected to the Board has to be one of the best experiences of my life.”

Mike moved to Calgary in the 1960s to take a job with an oil and gas company. Years later his children became interested in horses, and he began taking riding lessons with them.

“It was either that,” he says, “or just stand outside the cold arena and watch them have all the fun.”

In the 1980s, O’Connor took up team cattle penning, eventually winning the Canadian AQHA national title three times and qualifying for the World Championships in 1992. The wannabe cowboy was learning the ropes.

After several years of moving cattle at competitions and volunteering unofficially at the Stampede, Mike joined the Stampede’s Cutting Horse committee. Soon after, he helped expand the committee’s mandate to include team penning and working cow horse competitions. At the same time he took on responsibility for the committee’s sponsorship initiatives, raising annual revenues from about $15,000 to almost $300,000. He also helped out with the Sheep committee and the Stampede’s initiative to construct a new agricultural arena.

Mike is an award-winning photographer, and when he’s not on a horse or on his boat, he likes to travel the world with his camera. When he’s at home, he divides his time between his ranch west of Millarville and an acreage northwest of Calgary.

“For much of the last 30 years my philosophy for life has been incredibly simple: ‘Have fun, do good work, and earn a living...and never change the order.’ ‘Have fun’ because we only have one life to live. ‘Do good work’ because as professionals it’s important to autograph our work with excellence, and ‘earn a living’ because we all have responsibilities to others. Being where I am in life now, I’ve changed the last priority from ‘earn a living to ‘give back’. And one of the ways I can do that best is with my involvement here at the Stampede.”

O’Connor has held executive and board positions on a number of public and private companies, professional, not-for-profit and charitable organizations. He has served on the advisory councils of three universities, the Canadian and Alberta Geological Surveys, and the Calgary Health Region. He says, however, that “…none of these have captured my fancy as much as being a part of The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth. It’s a dream come true.”