The standings at any given track are certainly not the end-all, be-all when it comes to measuring a trainer's performance with racehorses. That said, the current standings at West Virginia's Mountaineer Park present a compelling picture of an up-and-coming young trainer who has finally earned a chance to show what he can do.
Ben Delong has saddled 14 winners from 46 starters at Mountaineer this year, placing him second in the standings behind Jay Bernardini, who has 15 wins from 133 starts. The 34-year-old Delong is in the middle of a career year, despite the pandemic, posting his highest-ever earnings and poised to eclipse his highest number of winners.
“I'm on a hot streak right now, but I'll be honest with you, I'm just feeding faster horses,” Delong said, laughing. “I had some new owners who did well at the end of last year, and they started sending me new horses. I used to have 15 to 20 horses, and now I have 45 to 50. It's just having the quality of horses and going where I think they're going to be live.”
Delong isn't stabled at Mountaineer in New Cumberland, W.Va., but instead bases his operation at the Ashwood Training Center in Lexington, Ky. Being at Ashwood allows Delong to be hands-on with the horses from the first time they wear a saddle all the way to the winner's circle, and everything in between. He even drives the trailer hauling the horses to the races, more often than not.
“I'm just not suited for a nine-to-five (kind of job),” he said. “I guess I'm on the five-to-nine schedule instead.”
Perhaps the biggest win of his career came last fall at Churchill Downs, when Delong saddled A Girl Named Jac to win a maiden special weight event at odds of 17-1. The filly was his first winner beneath the Twin Spires.
A $5,500 yearling purchase at the Keeneland September sale in 2018, the Ontario-bred daughter of Point of Entry was sent to Delong to be started under saddle. He liked the filly from the start, so when the owners approached him in 2019 about training her in exchange for an ownership stake, Delong agreed.
“I took her on a deal because I liked the horse, and because I only had about eight horses at the time, so I was more than willing to jump on it,” he explained. “She turned out to be a pretty decent little horse.”
A Girl Named Jac finished third in her debut at Indiana Grand on Nov. 1, then returned to win the Churchill race in mid-November. In February, Delong and the other partners sold her at OBS for $75,000.
It was a big deal for the long-time gallop hand to prove he could both see and develop a horse's potential, not only to the outside world, but to himself as well. Delong never got the opportunity to be an assistant under a big-name trainer, or to learn the art of training through any of the more traditional methods.
Instead, he was raised around the backside of Fairmount Park in Illinois by his father, a former jockey. Delong wanted to travel as soon as he was able, so he left his home track at 17 to work the circuit between Prairie Meadows in Iowa, Remington Park in Oklahoma, and Oaklawn Park in Arkansas. Delong galloped for different trainers, freelancing early on, and eventually picked up a salary job for Wayne Catalano.
Things changed when he and his fiancée, Cassie Corvin, had a daughter in 2009. Delong knew he needed to stabilize his lifestyle, and in 2011 he made the move to Lexington and got a job galloping for Kellyn Gorder. He kept freelancing on the side as well, and it was one of those freelance mounts, a horse named Compromisin I'mnot, that drew Delong into the training business.
The owner was looking to move the mare and wound up giving her to Delong. He took out his trainer's license, and Compromisin I'mnot gave him his first winner in 2013 at the now-defunct Beulah Park. In all, the mare ran in-the-money 12 out of 14 starts, and Delong knew he wanted to keep training.
Without an assistant position on the horizon, however, Delong started out training a few cheap horses of his own while galloping full-time. He would run them wherever he thought they could do well, often shipping out of town to do so.
“It's easier to ship and know you're going to get a check,” Delong said. “I'll never turn my back on the little small tracks. I'm obviously from one, I never look down on them.”
It took until 2018 for Delong to eclipse $100,000 in earnings; he won 20 races that year.
“I definitely had to learn by trial and error,” said Delong. “I was a very stubborn individual as I got into it, but as I got older, I realized asking for help is not a bad thing. Though, if it wasn't for being so stubborn, I probably would have chosen a different path!
“I guess you could say I worked under dad, because he taught me all I know about horses. He's pretty sharp with horses, since he trained and was a jockey, and he galloped for a lot of years for a lot of people. When I've got a question I don't know the answer to, he's my go-to guy.”
Though his father is now semi-retired at age 65, he still lives at Ashwood and helps out when he can. Delong racing remains a family operation, through-and-through; Delong's fiancée works Saturdays and Sundays at a hospital in Elizabethtown as a radiology technician, and she gets up early Monday mornings to help exercise horses at Ashwood.
“I couldn't do it without her,” Delong said. “We had plans to get married before COVID hit, but we put them on the back burner. We're gonna make a date soon enough, but we both have plans for the future and neither one of us is going anywhere; that piece of paper isn't going to change our life or our commitment.”
Delong also has a trusted assistant, Sherman Mitchell, whose 23-year-old son, Austin “Worm” Mitchell, is learning to be a groom and helps haul horses to the races when Delong has other commitments. (Worm earned his nickname because as a young boy he loved fishing so much that he used to carry worms around in his pockets.)
“He wanted to move forward and do like I did, working side by side with his dad,” Delong said of the younger Mitchell, now his barn foreman. “I can really rely on him. He goes above and beyond anything I could ask him to do, and he definitely wants to make sure the horses are where they need to be.”
Despite the pandemic and its effect on racing this year, things are looking up for Delong in 2020. He remains committed to the game because he loves the horses, but he admits there were times it wasn't easy to keep making his way to the track every morning.
“The racetrack is a very hard game,” Delong said. “It's not for the faint of heart, and you have to be willing to do a lot of going without to get where you want to be. Everybody wants to be able to move to the top of the game, but I'm a day-by-day kind of guy. Obviously I've got to deal with what I've got in front of me, and when I've got that kind of horse to go to that level, I'll be ready for it.”
At the end of the day, he just wants to provide a better life for his daughter, who hopes to be a marine biologist.
“Hopefully I can give her more than I had,” Delong said.
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