David Vance, a horse trainer for nearly 50 years and a throwback to a different era of racing, announced his retirement on Wednesday, according to a press release from Ellis Park.  Vance, 82, retires from training with 3,193 officially credited wins. Others might not have been credited, the ones at unsanctioned Midwest bush tracks, now long gone. Vance won training titles at Oaklawn Park, Churchill Downs, and elsewhere.  Vance had sent out but one winner in 2023, a far cry from totals he racked up annually during the early and mid-1970s. Vance, who started his first horse in 1965, trained for Dan Lasater, who built a claiming empire that centered around Oaklawn Park and was North America’s leading owner for several years. Lasater gave Vance his big break in 1970. A Sports Illustrated profile of Lasater from 1975 documents how Vance, scraping by, left Detroit Race Course in 1970 with his wife and two kids to try his hand at a new Pennsylvania track, Liberty Bell. Not long after, Lasater hired Vance, whose career took off. A large chunk of Vance’s wins, 1,109 of them, came between 1973 and 1977.   :: DRF's 2023 Saratoga headquarters: Previews, past performances, picks, recaps, news, and more. Vance, the son of trainer Richard Vance and a small-time jockey before he took up training, split with Lasater in 1976 – not bad timing, since Lasater, an Arkansas political power broker, pled guilty in 1984 to distribution of cocaine. Out on his own, Vance continued to have success, his stable quality rising beyond claiming horses, particularly through an association that began in the mid-1990s with owner-breeder Carl Pollard, former chairman of the board at Churchill Downs. Vance’s most important win came in 2000, when Pollard’s homebred Caressing captured the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies.  In 2007, Vance suffered terrible injuries, losing the use of his legs, in a one-car accident. He continued training, helped by his son Tommy and daughter Trisha Vance Duncan, both of whom currently operate their own stables.  Vance, like any successful claiming trainer, was sharp and shrewd. He was known, too, as an extremely capable horseman. And after spending parts of seven decades at the track, Vance is calling it quits.  :: Want to learn more about handicapping and wagering? Check out DRF's Handicapping 101 and Wagering 101 pages.