Not every racehorse seems destined for the Hall of Fame from the day it first sets foot on the racetrack.

Trainer Brad Maxwell recounts the early days of a troubled filly who was cut from the same cloth as her gritty sire, and recalls a message he heard loud and clear from the man who baby-raced her for him one morning in Lexington. By Melissa Keith

She was foaled in Mt. Pleasant, Ontario, and originally bore the name “Sweet Celine.” Yet a conversation with her trainer quickly yields the truth: the young Elegantimage was neither pleasant, nor sweet, nor even elegant. In fact, the 2017 Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame inductee initially offered very little to raise Brad Maxwell’s confidence. Her difficult attitude was only part of it.
“When she trained in 2:40, as a two-year-old, she made a rather loud noise, flipping her palette, and Dr. [Huw] Llewellyn flew down to Florida and did throat surgery on her. I was very skeptical of her ability,” Maxwell tells TROT.

“And then another day, we were at Ben White Raceway [Orlando, Florida]. I was breaking her and taking her down to the track. One barn had chickens. They were playing around in the shrubs, and she heard them and saw them, and she took off sideways. I ended up on top of a shavings pile, with the jog cart and her.”

Elegantimage was even more problematic for her original caretaker, adds Maxwell.
“One day I was going by the stall, and the first groom, he was standing in the corner, leaning down with his hands over his head. She had the bridle swinging around her head, swinging it and swinging it while he was curled up in the corner! So I said, ‘What the hell is going on here?’, and he said, ‘She friggin’ knocked me down! The bridle, I can’t get it on her head!’”

The strong-minded filly would take careful handling to become a racehorse. Maxwell recalls that in a barn filled with many well-bred stakes prospects, Elegantimage didn’t stand out as one worth the extra coddling. Fortunately, he heard a dissenting opinion from a stable employee, a man from a human bloodline known for its talent with trotters.

“I had a guy on, helping me out for years—his name was Ben White III,” explains Maxwell. “His dad won the Hambo a couple of times; his grandfather won it three times. Just a great guy and a good friend of mine. He said, ‘You know what? Let me train her the rest of the winter.’ And I said, ‘You know what? You train her all you want!’ So Ben White III trained her down. I had 30 horses; she was just one he said he really liked. He trained her down and got along with her great, and she made it to the races.”

Elegantimage never lacked for physical gifts. “She was very athletic; she had a pure gait,” remarks Maxwell, “She was just really tough.” Blessed with the infamous Balanced Image temperament, the filly demanded no less than a caretaker who would accommodate her quirks, never seeking more than basic compromise on her part.

Maxwell assigned a skilled Dutch-Canadian groom, Johnny Butinck, to the two-year-old Elegantimage. Her new caretaker realised what her first one had not: “She had warts in her ears, and so she didn’t want you to touch her ears.” Butinck devised a clever work-around, adds the trainer: “He’d take the crown of the bridle and lift it over her ears, every day, and put the rest of the bridle together on her head. He took her bridle apart for two years, and put it over her ears. She liked Johnny.”

With Ben White III and Johnny Butinck working to ready Elegantimage for the start of her racing career, Maxwell says he was still unconvinced that the trotter was destined to become one of Canada’s best. But the evidence was mounting, especially after he took the as-yet-unraced filly to The Red Mile in 1996.

“When we got up to Lexington, I was looking around for someone to qualify her. At the end of June, I wanted to qualify my babies, if I could, and have all my three-year-olds qualify, and then bring them home [to Ontario] and race them. So we started to qualify some of them and he [White] said ‘Let’s use Chip Noble to qualify them.’ And I thought, he’s kind of tough on colts, but then [White] reassured me that [Noble] only drove his dad’s horses like that, not everybody else’s! So I got Chip Noble to drive her and all of my other colts, and he never said a word about them until he qualified her and she went a mile in like 2:05. He pulled up, gave me the lines on the horse, patted her on the neck, and said, ‘This is a good one—take care of her.’ And I never forgot that. We came up to Canada and it’s just win, win, win, win. I never forgot that mile in 2:05, when he got off the bike and said that.”

The rest of the Elegantimage story—Trillium and Oakville and Ontario Sires Stakes and Canadian Breeders Championships and Robert Stewart Memorial victories at two, en route to her inaugural O’Brien Award; eight wins in ten OSS events at age three, the Canadian Breeders Championships final, and a repeat divisional O’Brien title—is part of the public record of the great mare’s life. Her 1:55.4 lifetime mark, and her $955,368 in earnings, plus the dominating style of her triumphs, made her a clear choice for the Hall of Fame. Induction was, her former trainer suggests, only a matter of time.

“I think there’s always a line-up to get into things like this [the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame]. Yes, she deserves to be in there—she was the best two- and three-year-old in Canada for those two years that she raced. She was one of Balanced Image’s early stars.”

Maxwell gives credit to the horsemen who saw Elegantimage’s latent potential, especially Ben White III, whom he says retired from the sport in April. “I was lucky enough to take her to the races when she started racing, because I didn’t train her hardly at all as a two-year-old. I had 30 horses and I didn’t particularly like her, so I let [White] train her, and I never regretted it, either.”

Now 25 years of age, Elegantimage is owned by Doug Millard of Woodstock, Ontario, one of her original owners. Part of her multi-faceted legacy, apart from the Woodbine trotting series named for her, and her offspring, led by Elegant Serenity (3, 1:53.2s; $511,173), came in helping build the reputation of her Ontario-based sire.

“She was a true Balanced Image,” laughs Maxwell. “She had a bit of a temper; she was quite nice, actually, on the racetrack. It was everywhere else, like getting to the racetrack, she was just tough.”

To this day, the horseman and former professional hockey coach admits he never expected the young Elegantimage to attain greatness. “You can go and say, like everyone else, ‘Oh, she was perfect from day one!’, but that’s bullshit, because none of these colts are perfect from day one,” says the ever-candid Maxwell. “You know what? You’re just lucky to have one like her walk through your barn, that’s all it is.”

Call the mare by any number of terms denoting trotting excellence, and Maxwell enthusiastically agrees that they apply. Just don’t say she lived up to her name, because the tough daughter of a famously-tough stallion was always more bruiser than refined lady. In the unmistakable words of her trainer, “She was only elegant in the winners’ circle!” And now, the Hall of Fame.