Sayler saddles 1000th win

Aberdeen, SD - July 12, 2011 - After all, individual lifetime achievement is often evaluated in terms of base hits accumulated, yardage gained and championships won.

For that reason alone, the recent achievement by Aberdeen native and Rapid City horse trainer Ardell Sayler in saddling his 1,000th-winning horse at Assiniboia Downs race track in Winnipeg, Canada, is a noteworthy achievement.

Although saddling up 1,000 winning mounts is indeed an incredible feat — 300 is considered remarkable at the track, according to Downs CEO Darren Dunn — the achievement is made even more special, by the fairy tale-like circumstances surrounding the 2-year-old filly named Menyata. It is a horse bred, owned and trained by Sayler that raced and won Sayler’s 1,000th race.

“When that foal was born, the mare that gave birth to it died about 10 hours later, and my daughter, Nicole, and my wife, Janet, bottle-fed that baby every couple of hours for a couple of months,” said the 59-year-old Sayler, who has been training and racing horses at the Winnipeg track since 1991.

“So the girls had her all grown up and pretty well spoiled, and who would have ever dreamt that horse would be my 1,000th win? To have her win was quite a warm feeling.”

Janet, who in addition to assisting her husband in the family horse ranch is employed as the Treasurer for Pennington County, remembers some rather long nights as she and daughter Nicole bottle-fed the newborn colt through its first days at the family horse training facility in Rapid Valley.

“We delivered the colt in the middle of the night and about four hours later the mare died, so we started bottle-feeding the baby and we fed it four times a day,” Janet said.

“Nicole and I changed off on our lunch hours, and we would get up at 2 a.m.

also and feed it. We did that for three months.”

Although Janet was not able to be in attendance at her husband’s record setting race, she was able, along with Nicole, to watch the horse race through the Internet.

“We watched it on the computer,” Janet said, “and it was very exiting since it was such a great accomplishment for Ardell with all the races he has won over the years. It certainly made it even more special to us because we had all put so much energy into that colt, and it was raised right here in Rapid City, making it twice as special.”

Sayler, who grew up in a horse racing family in the Aberdeen area — two brothers were nationally ranked jockeys and two others horse trainers — moved to Rapid City in 1977, and after a couple of other business ventures gravitated back to the horse industry in 1985.

Read More: Aberdeen News