Page 97 - December_2023

“You had to get your seat right, because he would reach and try to get the reins from you. If you weren’t careful, he’d pull you over his head.”
– Randy Edwards
Four Forty Queen, dam of Sir Winsalot.
twice. Moreover, Tiny Charger was a son of Depth Charge, who sired 1952 AQHA World Champion Johnny Dial and was inducted into the AQHA Hall of Fame in 1991.
By all accounts, the first person to notice Lord Winsalot’s potential was a teenage exercise rider named Randy Edwards. When he was
a sophomore, Edward’s basketball coach,
Paul Walters, asked if he could help him
with training business. “I weighed eighty-five pounds,” Edwards recalls. “...And he said, ‘Do you know anything about a horse?’ I said, ‘Yes sir, I do.’” After that, Walters told him, “Well,
I train racehorses, and I could use somebody cleaning the stalls and exercising my horses – and maybe breaking one, if you know enough about it.” Edwards eagerly agreed and later convinced his younger brother to join him.
At the time, Paul Walters was training some of Ronny Schliep’s horses, including Lord Winsalot. “I had Lord Winsalot and his half-brother Winsalot Enough,” Edwards says. He quickly sensed Lord Winsalot’s ability. “When I was working him, he was real skittish,” he remembers, “but he just had so much power it was crazy.”
Edwards taught Lord Winsalot how to race in a “little four-gate field...on the creek.” There, the coming two-year-old gelding proved to be
a talented but difficult pupil. “You had to get your seat right,” Edward explains, “because he would reach and try to get the reins from you. If you weren’t careful, he’d pull you over his head.” However, this behavior apparently stemmed from Lord Winsalot’s unwillingness to be held back. “He was my favorite horse in the barn,”
Edwards reminisces, “but he really didn’t like to be messed with too much. He was real fidgety about his ears and I’d rub on his head to try and calm him down. When you went in his stall, he wouldn’t really kick you, but he’d turn his butt to you pretty fast.”
In spite of his quirks, Lord Winsalot progressed rapidly enough for Edwards to declare him the “fastest horse I’ve ever ridden
in my life.” He was particularly impressed by the gelding’s starting speed. “He would break so hard,” Edwards recalls, “that I pulled all the hair out of his mane the first time I rode him.” Lord Winsalot was also full of energy, “He wanted to run from the time you brought him out of the barn to the time you brought him back.”
One day, Edwards and his brother decided to test Lord Winsalot against Angel’s Wings, an AAA-rated filly, who had recently won Oklahoma’s Blue Ribbon Futurity. “We weren’t supposed to be doing that,” Edwards admits, “but we got those two horses down there and
we marked off about three-hundred yards.” The result was startling. After powering from the gate, Lord Winsalot grabbed the early lead and pulled away. Despite being held back until the end, he beat Angel’s Wings by “at least thirty yards.” For Edwards, it was confirmation that he had been right about the gelding’s racing prowess.
Towards the end of 1975, a man named Jim Jay visited the barn. The owner of a gasoline distribution company in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Jay had been dabbling in the sport for three years. His decision to own Quarter Horses didn’t just stem from a love of racing, “The main reason I did it,” he admitted, “was to pick up a tax write off.” Initially, Jay hoped his operation would lose $40,000 a year for two years for tax purposes. His plan backfired. In 1975 alone, he made “a profit of about $5,000 to $8,000.”
Either way, Jay found himself in a predicament at the end of that year. “At the time, I only had one 2 year old,” Jay explained. “I’d bought him at a sale, but he wasn’t turning
© Speedhorse Archives
© Speedhorse Archives
Sir Winsalot, sire of Lord Winsalot.
SPEEDHORSE December 2023 95