Golden West Farms was a Canadian Thoroughbred horse racing stable and breeding farm at Okotoks, Alberta owned by Frank McMahon and Max Bell.
Both partners were successful businessmen who invested in Thoroughbred racehorses. Frank McMahon most notably owned U.S. Racing Hall of Fame colt Majestic Prince, winner of the 1969 Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes. Max Bell owned successful horses including the colt Meadow Court in a partnership with friend, Bing Crosby. Meadow Court raced in Europe where he won the 1965 Irish Derby and the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes.
According to the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame, Golden West Farms was "by far the most elaborate thoroughbred breeding farm between Ontario and British Columbia". The operation campaigned at race tracks across Canada. In 1967 their horse Gilmore won the Canadian Derby at Edmonton's Northlands Park. Trainer Roy Johnson campaigned horses for Golden West Farms at Woodbine Racetrack during the 1960s where they won numerous stakes races including the Coronation Futurity Stakes and the 1968 Plate Trial Stakes then Canada's most prestigious horse race, the Queen's Plate.
The partnership was dissolved on the death of Max Bell in 1972.
Famous quotes containing the words golden, west and/or farms:
“Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands, and crystal brooks,
With silken lines, and silver hooks.”
—John Donne (1572–1631)
“There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“We noticed several other sandy tracts in our voyage; and the course of the Merrimack can be traced from the nearest mountain by its yellow sand-banks, though the river itself is for the most part invisible. Lawsuits, as we hear, have in some cases grown out of these causes. Railroads have been made through certain irritable districts, breaking their sod, and so have set the sand to blowing, till it has converted fertile farms into deserts, and the company has had to pay the damages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)