Saratoga Race Course Regular Visits President Trump
The 2024 Stanley Cup-winning Florida Panthers visited with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Monday. Photo via Margo Martin, Special Assistant and Communications Advisor to President Trump.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Vincent Viola, a regular at the Saratoga Race Course, visited with President Donald Trump at the White House on Monday to celebrate the Florida Panthers’ 2024 Stanley Cup victory (Viola owns the team).
“We brought a cohort, to use a term we use in the military, of champions to visit a champion,” Viola said to Trump amid a roomful of spectators. “Your kindness and the hospitality displayed by your staff is a simple reflection of the excellence that you demand of your people and we were the beneficiaries of it today.”
Viola brought the Stanley Cup to the Saratoga Race Course last summer, allowing visitors to pose alongside the hockey trophy. He also reportedly owns (or owned) several multi-million-dollar homes in Saratoga Springs.
Viola is a horse racing enthusiast and the owner of St. Elias Stable, which produced the 2017 Kentucky Derby winner Always Dreaming. In 2016, the billionaire businessman was briefly President Trump’s pick for the United States Secretary of the Army, before he withdrew from consideration.
Also in 2016, Viola was accused of punching a concessions worker at a Fasig-Tipton racehorse auction in Saratoga. According to the New York Times, charges were not brought because neither Viola nor the concessions worker wanted to press charges and officers had not witnessed the incident.