The Champion Stallion Gelding
by Lisa Harkema
He was an incredibly talented but with a challenging temper and extremely unlucky with injuries. Hailing from an exceptionally strong family, the gelding Västerbo Prestige turned out to be an exceptional stallion who unfortunately had a very limited number of foals.
At 3, the start of his career was not without challenges. The chestnut colt had problems finding his feet, broke and did not make a single penny in his first three races. Though there was no doubting the talent, Västerbo Prestige turned out to be his own worst enemy.
“He had a very complicated temperament. If the tractor was on the track, for example, then it easiest to drive into the stable and wait until the track was clear, otherwise the would just break. He was not a horse that was easy to trained – he probably had too much Insert Gede in him – but his trainer Flemming always held the horse incredibly high. Västerbo Prestige just couldn’t stand other horses, or anything that could upset him,” says Jeanette Hansen, who owned the horse together with her husband Jens.
It slowedly came together and it was uplifting when the colt won his next race. However, then followed eight starts where the Insert Gede-son would alternately win then break and finish out of the money. In mid-June he finished fifth in the 4-year-old elite at Charlottenlund in Copenhagen. That proved a turn-around, and after two wins in July and August the owners had high hopes ahead of the upcoming Swedish Derby elimination. “Our ambitions ahead of the Derby were massive. We were going to Thailand, but had planned the trip so we would land on the same day as the elimination, because we wouldn’t want to miss that for anything in the world,” Hansen recalls. However, the dreams would soon turn to heartbreak as a suspensory injury caused the colt to miss the elimination and he wouldn’t return for more than a year.