2024 – Thoroughbred Trainer
In the annals of Canadian horse racing history, trainer Dan Vella will be known as one of this country’s great horsemen who learned everything about Thoroughbreds from the ground up. A two-time Sovereign Award winner for Outstanding Trainer, Dan prepared two Queen’s Plate winners, some 30 graded stakes winners and a litany of champions. This evening he will take his place in the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame.
From the mid 1980s until his retirement in 2023, Dan sent out 869 winners from 5,740 starters and the earners of almost $40 million. He trained for some of the biggest Thoroughbred owners in the country such as Frank Stronach, Steve Stavro and the Sikura family. For seven years in the late 1990s, Dan trained at Stronach’s Adena Springs Farm in Ocala, Florida, preparing young horses into champions like Awesome Again and Perfect Sting, among others.
Introduced to horse racing as a child by his Uncle Jim Saliba, Dan fell in love with the track as a teenager and started working for Pat Collins, at that time the trainer for Stavro’s Knob Hill Stable. It would be for Knob Hill that Dan would win his first stakes race soon after he obtained his own trainer’s licence in 1985 when Bert James won the Sir Barton Stakes at Greenwood racetrack.
Dan joined the powerful Stronach operation in 1991 and provided them with their first Queen’s Plate win in 1994 when Basqueian muscled his way to victory. A flashy bay gelding, Basqueian has always been one of Vella’s favourites. From there, the list of champions and graded stakes winners trained by Dan continued to grow. He sent out Explosive Red to win the prestigious Grade 1 Hollywood Derby, and won big races with Hero’s Love, Blitzer, Mysteriously, Phantom Light and Mark One.
He won back-to back Sovereign Awards as the country’s top trainer in 1994 and 1995.
Following his time at Adena Springs in Florida, Dan was back at Woodbine in 2003 and soon opened a public stable. In 2012, Dan took a hard-to-handle colt named Strait of Dover from British Columbia for Wally and Terry Leong and made him a Plate winner. In 2016, he trained a very green 2-year-old named Channel Maker and made him a stakes winner. Fittingly, Channel Maker, who went on to become an American champion for trainer Bill Mott, is also being inducted into the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame this evening.
Dan worked as the horseman’s liaison for Woodbine for one year following his retirement and now spends his retirement enjoying the few racehorses he owns with long-time friend, Stephen Shefsky. and spending time with his wife Catherine.