Wesley Ward
Trainer
Pioneering US trainer Wesley Ward is another famous name amongst the Deva Racing ranks.
Born in the state of Washington in March 1968, Wesley hails from a long line of horsemen and a career in the industry was always on the cards. Having honed his riding skills on the country fair circuits from the age of 12, he took out his professional licence in 1984 and went on to ride a staggering 335 winners that year, a tally that propelled him to the prestigious Eclipse Award as champion apprentice jockey.
Unfortunately, rising weight curtailed Wesley’s nascent riding career at the age of twenty-one, so a switch to training rather than riding horses was in the offing. He spent two years assisting his father Dennis, also a trainer, before striking out on his own and saddling his first winner when Mariani Red won at Yakima Meadows on the 6th of January 1991.
He secured a first Stakes victory with Unfinished Symph at Hollywood Park in 1994, and a virtually unbroken run of success in the subsequent decades now sees him on the verge of saddling his 2,400th winner. The trainer began to hit the big time shortly after the turn of the century, sending out fifty winners in 2001, and has bettered that total every year since.
Wesley came to international attention when targeting Royal Ascot for the first time in 2009, becoming the first American trainer ever to win at the famous meeting. He secured a fabulous double courtesy of Strike The Tiger in the Listed Windsor Castle Stakes and Jealous Again in the Gr.2 Queen Mary Stakes (the first of four wins in the race) and has continued to plunder the meeting more recently. Some of his most famous Royal Ascot winners include No Nay Never in the Gr.2 Norfolk Stakes, Lady Aurelia in the Gr.1 King’s Stand Stakes (now known as the King Charles III Stakes) and Campanelle in the Gr.1 Commonwealth Cup.
In addition to his Royal Ascot heroics, Wesley has also written his name into the history books at the Breeders’ Cup championships. He has won the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf Sprint on occasions and completed a double at the meeting in 2014 with Hootenanny in the Gr.1 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf and Judy The Beauty in the Gr.1 Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Sprint.
Although Wesley did not bring a team to Royal Ascot in 2025, he is enjoying another excellent campaign on home soil, maintaining an outstanding 25% strike-rate at the time of writing, and is plotting future raids on European racing.
