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PROFILE
Making a difference at WinStar When Kenny Troutt and Bill Casner purchased Prestonwood Farm from Jack, Art, and J.R. Preston before the 2000 breeding season began and renamed the property WinStar Farm, among the stallions included in the package were two that had been raced by Prestonwood and trained by Elliott Walden: Victory Gallop, who was set to cover his initial book of mares; and Distorted Humor, whose first foals, including future Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes winner Funny Cide, were in utero.
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WORDS: FRANCES J. KARON PHOTOS: HORSEPHOTOS, WINSTAR
ALDEN guided the careers of Distorted Humor, originally handled by Phil Gleaves, from his third start onward and Victory Gallop, previously trained by Mary Eppler, beginning with the colt’s threeyear-old debut. Racing for Prestonwood Farm and R.L. Reineman, Distorted Humor won four graded stakes races and set a new track record in the 7-furlong, Grade 2 Churchill Downs Handicap in 1998. “He had 15 Beyers over 100,” recalls Walden. Victory Gallop was even more successful. After runner-up efforts to Real Quiet in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, the son of Cryptoclearance denied his rival the Triple Crown by a nose in the 1998 Belmont Stakes. Walden says, “I think Victory Gallop deserved to win one, so I didn’t feel bad. He was a horse that, every time he ran, he just showed up. He was a real racehorse.” As a four-year-old, Victory Gallop won the Grade 1 Whitney and Grade 2 Stephen Foster Handicaps en route to earning the Eclipse Award for champion older male. So it was only natural that Walden, having been instrumental in the high points of two of
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“I enjoyed my days of training greatly and we had a lot of success and a great team, but this is challenging in a different way” the partners’ new stallions, caught their eye, and he was sent the majority of WinStar’s racing stock, eventually becoming private trainer in early 2002. Then in the summer of 2005, he accepted the position of WinStar racing manager, signaling a big lifestyle change for someone who had been training for 20 years. Walden, who went on to be named vice president at the end of 2005 and president and CEO of WinStar in November, 2010, says, “You know, I get asked a lot if I would ever go back to training. I loved training and basically feel blessed to be doing anything in the horse business but so far as going back to training, it’s not something I’m thinking about. I’ve got the best job in the game, it feels like. I enjoyed my days of training greatly and we had a lot of
success and a great team, but this is challenging in a different way. “The big difference,” he continues, “is just the different areas that I’m involved with. The focus of my thoughts and energy goes from mares in the spring to two-year-olds and then you transition into the Derby and it goes back to the racehorses, and in the late summer you start focusing on the yearlings, so I’m able to focus on different things, which keeps it really exciting and engaging.” Originally, Walden, whose brother is Ben Jr. and whose father Ben Sr. owned a horse farm, sought the excitement he craved on the racetrack. “I felt like the action there was more my style,” he says. “Farm life seemed a little slow at the time, but that was before I got involved with WinStar. There’s nothing slow about WinStar! A traditional farm with 30 mares and two stallions was a little bit slow for me so I gravitated towards the racetrack. I liked the atmosphere and the horses and decided early on that I wanted to be a trainer.” He worked under Dennis Ebert, who trained horses for Ben P. Walden Sr. and had been an assistant to Frank Whiteley; LeRoy Jolley, who at the time had Genuine Risk and General Assembly and was “the Todd Pletcher of his day”; and John Gosden,