From a well-known Kentucky racing family, Will Walden saddled the first winner of his fledgling career earlier this month at Churchill Downs. However, his route there has been anything but smooth, as the trainer tells Jon Lees in an unflinching account
At around 1.20pm on May 13, Will Walden became the latest new trainer to lead his first winner into the hallowed Churchill Downs winner’s circle beneath those famous Twin Spires.
As a third-generation Kentucky horseman and the son of Elliott Walden, one of the most successful US trainers towards the turn of the century and now CEO of the powerful WinStar Farm, the landmark may have appeared nothing out of the ordinary.
After all, a career as a Thoroughbred trainer seemed to have been mapped out from birth – yet Will’s arrival in the spot that his father’s runners visited more than a thousand times was not the culmination of years of careful preparation.
For much of the preceding 12 years Walden veered right off the given pathway and onto the fast lane to drug addiction. It was a route that nearly took him to the grave.
On that basis the success of the two-year-old filly Dazzlingdominika, Walden’s fourth runner since receiving his licence in April, under jockey Gerardo Corrales in a maiden special weight, Race 2 on the Churchill card, was pretty extraordinary.
‘It was surreal – and very rewarding’
“It was surreal,” agrees Walden. “I’ve been in that winner’s circle plenty of times with my Dad when he was training. He trained for 22 years and the bulk of it at Churchill Downs.
“To go in there with our own horse after what me and these guys have been through and see a plan come to fruition the way we saw it in our minds eight months ago was very rewarding.”
As well as from his father, Walden had been learning the ropes working for many of the country’s top trainers such as Jonathan Sheppard, Dale Romans, Bill Mott, Todd Pletcher and Wesley Ward. Yet it was what he got up to outside training hours that took him in another direction.
“Drugs and alcohol became an everyday part of my life from the age of 18 or 19,” says Walden, now 31. “It kind of started out with your typical college partying and I liked to take it to the max. At the end it was a full-blown heroin and crack cocaine addiction coupled with severe alcoholism.
“I couldn’t really figure out how things had gotten so bad but by that time I was more than just mentally attached to it, I was physically addicted to it. When you get to that point it’s nothing but the grace of God and the help of a lot of people that can break you away from that.”
After leaving high school, Walden went to Asbury University in Kentucky on a basketball scholarship, but much as he excelled at the sport, he dropped out and returned to the racetrack.
‘I didn’t care about anything’
“I bounced all over the east coast for different trainers,” he says. “I don’t think they knew of my addictions. I thought I hid it well – I could suffer through the sicknesses or the hangovers for most of the morning.
“Then when I got home late morning I would start my day off substance-wise. Towards the end I am sure some of them knew. At that point I didn’t really care who knew; I didn’t care about anything, including my own life.”
Walden’s drug abuse took him to many dark places, often ending up in the hospital ER or a jail cell. “I went to jail a few times,” he says. “The first time was in my early 20s for various things, public intoxication, DUIs [driving under the influence], assault, stuff like that. I was a pretty grimy human being.
“I went to treatment rehabs several times and ended up in hospitals with nurses and doctors bringing me back to life with defibrillators, with me not sure how he ended up there. 
“At that point you are so delusional about existence in general. Practical and logical thinking don’t come into play. There is no self-preservation whatsoever, nor do you care about what anybody else thinks. Once you're addicted you are so zeroed in on substance, you don’t care what means or avenues it takes to get there.”
Walden’s campaign of addiction was broken occasionally for periods of treatment but he could only last three or four months on the program before returning to his old habits with heroin and crack cocaine top of his shopping list.
“I was taking in copious amounts every day, enough to kill a horse,” he says. “It was bad. I would be up for three or four days, weeks at a time, with no sleep.”
It was only when he stopped hearing from friends calling in to check up on him that he finally recognised he had to break the cycle for good. “I was as alone as one could possibly feel and being alone in hell is one of the worst places to be,” he says.
Walden’s saviour was armed forces veteran Christian Countzler, who worked at Shepherds House, a drug treatment program in Lexington. “Up until then it had been everyone else’s idea,” says Walden.
“Christian didn’t beat down my door, he just said, ‘Whenever you’re ready, whenever you want to change, give me a call’. That day came on November 23, 2020, and I haven’t ingested a drink or substance since.”
Regimented routine of sober living
Walden spent two weeks of painful detox under careful monitoring before being transferred to an outpatient facility where he stayed for 30 days before entering the Shepherds House on a year-long program.
“At that point there was no more medication to help ease you off drugs and alcohol,” he explains. “You had to sign in and out. You had daily chores, you worked a full-time job, you had to make seven AA meetings a week, It became a very regimented daily routine of sober living which at the end of the day left me completely exhausted. But it worked.
“There was nowhere for my mind to run to, to go and do something silly. Everything was planned out for me. While a lot of it was tedious and elementary, it served its purpose.”
Walden found a job at a branch of the Wendy's fast food restaurant, close to the University of Kentucky campus. “I would walk about a mile to work at about 4am in the snow and do a full shift,” he says. “I was sweeping up the parking lot, flipping burgers, sea-salting fries. It was bottom-level work and a humbling experience.
“I keep my Wendy's hat and uniform in my truck as a reminder of where I could be. At that point of my life I was just so grateful to have some semblance of purpose. There was someone counting on me to show up and I was able to do that. There is a sense of pride.”
During his time in the Shepherds House, Walden met Frank Taylor, of leading horse sales consignor Taylor Made, who ran a program helping recovering addicts from the Shepherds House with jobs on his farm.
Towards the end of his stay, Walden put the proposal to Taylor that he could buy some cheap horses to run in auction races. Two of the friends he had made, Mike Lowrey and Tyler Maxwell, joined him from the Taylor Made program, having had no prior experience with horses.
‘There is still trust to be gained’
He has nine horses in training, including one named Sergeant Countzler, all cheaply bought. “That’s what it is supposed to be early on,” he says, “especially with somebody who has been absent from the sport of horse racing and wasn’t that stellar of an individual when he was on the racetrack.”
What about the prospect of taking on more expensive, better-bred horses? “There is still trust to be gained,” he says.
Walden blames only himself for the gruesome depths to which he has sunk. “Self-will got a needle in my arm and a crack pipe to my lips and a bottle down my throat,” he says, adding that he is able to stay clean and sober thanks to “a relationship with a God of my understanding, a healthy support group of friends, people that were in recovery, AA meetings and an ability to stay humble.”
He adds: “I’m not sitting here gripping the walls at night, hanging on to the side of my bed, praying to God I don’t have to go out and drink or take drugs. It doesn’t cross my mind today as a solution to deal with a problem.
“That’s because people who have been living this life showed me the way to do it. I swallowed it hook, line and sinker and stuck to it. They say the obsession will be removed and by the grace of God it has.
Spiritual maintenance of daily life
“The spiritual maintenance of my daily life is key. I come to the barn first thing in the morning, I feed my horses, I go grab a cup of coffee and sit up by the track by the quarter pole, have my morning prayer and surrender everything out of my own control and give it over to God. It’s worked today and hopefully it will work tomorrow.”
Early success on the track with a filly broken by Lowery and Maxwell has already shown Walden what he can achieve in the short term but in the long run he aspires to reach the heights of his father, who won the Belmont Stakes in 1998 with Victory Gallop.
“The goal is to be the biggest training operation in the United States,” he says. “There is no ceiling. We are not here for any participation trophy. We don’t want pats on the back because we are group of guys that have rearranged our lives.
“We want to compete with anybody out there. We show up every single day ready to do so. But right now we work with what we have.”
There is another goal behind his frank telling of his story. “The past was the sword they used to stab me, but now I use it to defend,” he says. “I don’t mind talking about my past, especially in public, because there were people that put themselves out there when I was going through what I went through.
“In a lifestyle where there was absolutely zero hope, there was a beacon of light from those people that were able to get past getting vulnerable and saying what their lives were like now.
“So it’s not about me. Do I like telling everybody I was a heroin addict and a crackhead? No, I don’t. But on the off-chance that it could help somebody, it’s completely worth it.”
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