Gerry Duffy has had a lot of important jobs in horse racing, but now he has landed what he calls his “dream” job. Duffy was named President of WinStar Farm Apr. 1, and is set to formally take over as CEO and President when Elliott Walden steps down Oct. 1. Why the dream job? Because WinStar is one of the most important breeding and racing operations in the country and the farm has hit it out of the park with stallion Life Is Good, whose first crop are tearing up the racetrack. To talk about his role at WinStar, the success of Life Is Good and his background, Duffy joined this week's TDN Writers' Room Podcast presented by Keeneland. He was the Gainesway Guest of the Week.Life Is Good has had 11 individual winners, but the best may be The Good Life, who captured Sunday's Grade I Hopeful Stakes at Saratoga. A horse that was fast and classy, Life Is Good had the credentials to be a good sire, but has he exceeded the expectations of the WinStar team?“There's always hope,” Duffy said. “But when it comes to expectations, I don't think you can ever have expectations this high. From the stallion himself, to his ability and how he did it on the track, it was, at least to the team, that was what we were seeing early on with the two-year-olds down in Florida. They had lot of those same attributes, especially that speed. So the hope was there. But as much hope as there ever is, they still have to come and do it. And Sunday, when The Good Life won the Hopeful, that was validation that he has a huge future.”It wasn't predetermined that Duffy would wind up in the horse racing industry. A native of Ireland, he holds degrees in Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering from Trinity College Dublin and later earned an MBA from the University of Kentucky's Gatton College of Business and Economics. How, then, did he wind up in racing?“Horses were always part of our life growing up as a family,” he said. “My dad is the biggest horse lover in the world and always kept a riding horse and kept a pony for myself and my sister. As a younger person, I did not realize that a hobby could become a career. I always felt this need to get a proper job, so to speak. And hence, I looked at engineering and construction. Those were industries that were doing quite well in Ireland, and I kind of liked math and numbers. People have always asked me, 'how do you apply engineering to what you do today?' Ultimately, engineering is problem solving. You're taking big problems and you break them down into smaller, solvable problems, and we do that every day in this environment. It's everything from leading the team and helping them navigate their daily challenges. To do that, you've got to be an agronomist, a nutritionist, a land management specialist.” WinStar is a big part of a part of a sport that is booming in the breeding and sales industries in Kentucky and its horses are good enough that they participate at the top end of the sport on the racetrack. Yet, horse racing has a lot of problems and is facing serious issues. Duffy is well aware of that, but he is bullish on the future of the game.“I'm a glass half full kind of guy and I gravitate to all the positives in our game,” he said. “Look at the investment that's gone into Churchill Downs. NYRA is about to unveil a $500 million capital project in the new Belmont Park. There are improvements coming at Pimlico. Oaklawn Park has invested a lot of money. The top of the game is really strong. I think there are a lot of things happening at a macro level in society that we're probably only now catching up on, and that's how people want to watch sports, how they want to attend an event. Events like the Breeders' Cup, Royal Ascot and the big festivals of the world have been catching on and doing very well for some time. The point I'm trying to make is that there are an awful lot of positives at the top. I used to talk with my peers and friends in the industry five, 10 years ago, and we were concerned about where things were going then. But there isn't that doom-and-gloom feel anymore. I think we're seeing the high spots, we've seen the optimism, and we're seeing the opportunity that some of these challenges present if we can get it right. So I'm very optimistic about the future.”The “Fastest Horse of the Week” was U. S. S. Valor (War of Will), who was ultra impressive when breaking his maiden Saturday at Saratoga by 13 1/4 lengths. He earned a 105 Beyer figure. The Fastest Horse of the Week is sponsored by WinStar Farm.Elsewhere on the podcast, which is also sponsored by the PHBA, 1/ST TV, the KTOB and West Point Thoroughbreds, the team of Randy Moss, Bill Finley, and Zoe Cadman reviewed the big races from last weekend, including a quartet of Grade I races for two-year-olds, the Hopeful, the Spinaway, the Del Mar Debutante and the Del Mar Futurity.The group also offer opinions on the proposal to shorten the GI Belmont Stakes to a mile-and-a-quarter, and unanimously voiced the opinion that they were not in favor of the possible change in distance.The preview of this weekend's racing focused on the GI Rogers Woodbine Mile, which will feature what could be an epic showdown between Deterministic (Liam's Map) and European star Notable Speech (GB) (Dubawi ({Ire}).Click here to watch the Writers' Room Podcast, and here to listen to the program.The post WinStar’s Gerry Duffy Joins The TDN Writers’ Room Podcast appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.