Riding Her Luck

Memo to the publicity staff at Hollywood Park:

Be nice to horse owners. You might be training their horses some day.

“We met Jenine [Sahadi] when she was working in public relations at Hollywood,” C.N. Ray said. “She’d come down to see my wife [Carol] and me, to make sure we were comfortable. She was very gracious, she always gave us a super welcome. It’s something not all tracks do, you know. But Jenine was exceptional.”

Sahadi left Hollywood Park in 1991, shortly after R.D. Hubbard ousted chairman Marje Everett in a proxy battle.

“I had gone about as far as I could in marketing and publicity,” Sahadi said. “We had had a new director of marketing about every six months. There was no continuity. Then when we brought back the Goose Girl contest, that was it. That’s what pushed me over the edge.”

Sahadi segued from the press box to the backstretch. She left her $30,000-a-year job to work for Julio Canani, her boyfriend and the trainer who won the 1989 Santa Anita Handicap with Martial Law at 50-1.

In 1993, Sahadi took out a training license in April and won her first race a month later, with the first horse she saddled. Last year, at Woodbine, Sahadi became the first woman to train a Breeders’ Cup winner when that rogue Lit De Justice won the Sprint. This Saturday at Hollywood Park, she’ll take two shots at the Breeders’ Cup, with Elmhurst in the Sprint and El Angelo in the Mile.

All three of these horses have been campaigned by the Rays’ Evergreen Farm. They’re Sahadi’s biggest clients.

“Because Jenine was so nice to us at the track, we took an interest in her training career,” Ray said. “Then we started sending her horses. It’s paid huge dividends.”

Sahadi, 34, laughed when asked what she was doing on Breeders’ Cup day 10 years ago, when the races were last held at Hollywood Park.

“My job was to supervise the auxiliary press box,” she said. “What a mess that was. What a day.”

The turf writers were busy grumbling about their accommodations being usurped by the public. There was an overflow in the Turf Club, and many people were sent to the auxiliary press box to sit. A reporter from Cleveland arrived at his seat to find a man and his family making calls from his newspaper’s private phone.

Now Sahadi spends a lot of time on the phone herself.

“That’s one of the things I like about her,” Ray said. “She calls every day, with a rundown on every horse. Jenine is very smart, she loves her horses and even spoils them. She’s very dedicated. She’s not anxious to make a mad dash to the track to run all the time, and consequently we have older horses that can still run. It’s important that owners have the right chemistry with a trainer, and the chemistry between Jenine and Carol and I couldn’t be better.”

After the ’96 Breeders’ Cup, Lit De Justice, a 6-year-old, was retired. He ran 36 races, won 10 and earned $1.39 million. Now standing at Frank Stronach’s Adena Springs Farm in Midway, Ky., Lit De Justice’s stud fee has gone from $15,000 to $20,000. This past breeding season, he got 83 mares--an extraordinary number--in foal.

A horse with a mind of his own, Lit De Justice was Sahadi’s highest climb. “He wasn’t mean or vicious, but boy was he salty,” Sahadi said. “Corey [Nakatani, who rode him] was dropped several times. In the mornings, he didn’t want to train, and at the races he didn’t want to get in the gate.”

Sahadi tried everything, including a blindfold to get him in the gate. One day at Keeneland she saddled Lit De Justice so far from the other horses that she might just as well have been in Louisville. At Santa Anita, she battled with official starter Tucker Slender, since retired. She thought Slender should have been more tolerant of Lit De Justice’s balky gate habits. At the end, assistant starters were loading Lit De Justice by backing him into the gate.

Sahadi finished third with Lit De Justice in the 1995 Breeders’ Cup Sprint. Her other Breeders’ Cup starters have been Creston, 11th in the Juvenile in 1993; Megan’s Interco, fourth in the Mile in 1994; and Fastness, second behind Ridgewood Pearl in the Mile in 1995.

Sahadi recalled some of her Breeders’ Cup experiences.

“We were at Churchill Downs with Megan’s Interco,” she said. “That was an intimidating day. The long walk over with the horse, from the barn area to the paddock, is an experience that’s hard to explain. Then last year, I got to Canada with Lit De Justice about 2 1/2 weeks before the race, to get him used to the place. It worked for the horse, but it almost killed the trainer. I was a nervous wreck by race day.”

The horse that would have been Sahadi’s best chance this year, Rainbow Dancer, was injured while winning the Oak Tree Turf Championship and has been knocked out of the Breeders’ Cup Turf. Like Lit De Justice, Rainbow Dancer required special handling.

“We had to keep the screen in front of his stall closed at all times,” Sahadi said. “He would sink his teeth into people otherwise. Sometimes peppermints would help, but you still had to watch out.”

Her father, Fred Sahadi, is a longtime commercial breeder who recently moved his operation to the old Rio Vista Rancho, just north of San Luis Obispo, after selling Cardiff Stud to Alex Trebek, the host of “Jeopardy,” for a reported sum in excess of $4 million. Another of Fred and Helen Sahadi’s children, Stephen, manages the family farm.

Jenine Sahadi started college at Kentucky, in the heart of horse country. She was graduated from USC with a major in journalism and communications and started a marketing job at Hollywood Park two days later.

When Fred Sahadi talks about his training daughter, he can barely contain his buttons.

“Jenine’s not one of the best woman trainers, she’s one of the best trainers, period,” he said. “You wonder what she would do if she had a string of big clients like the Rays and had more decent horses. The horses she gets, many of them from Europe, are by and large castaways--horses nobody else wants.”

Sahadi discouraged his daughter from becoming a trainer.

“Let’s face it,” he said, “life on the backside isn’t always the best hand you can be dealt. But Jenine has always wanted this. She’s wanted it from the time she was five or six years old.”

In those days, before school, she was tending to goats as well as horses. She would get up at 5:30 a.m. and muck stalls and ride the horses before Helen Sahadi would have breakfast ready at 7:30.

“She’s the hardest-working person I’ve ever known,” Fred Sahadi said. “She believes she can do anything and the words ‘give up’ are not in her vocabulary. And she has such a deep feeling for the horses. She’s always had an almost irrational love for animals.”

In Elmhurst, Sahadi has a 7-year-old gelding who might have been better off if the six-furlong Breeders’ Cup Sprint were run at Santa Anita, where he has won five of seven starts on dirt. At Hollywood Park, Elmhurst is only two for eight, but he set the track record for 7 1/2 furlongs there in June. Bereft of early speed, Elmhurst needs an honest pace up front to be effective, something horses usually get in the Sprint.

In Elmhurst’s last race, the six-furlong Ancient Title Handicap at Santa Anita, he beat Swiss Yodeler by a head in 1:08 4/5, a time that would have been good enough to win eight of the previous 13 runnings of the Sprint.

“The Ancient Title set up real well for him,” Sahadi said. “If they go quick enough, he can close.”

Like Elmhurst, the long-striding El Angelo will go off a longshot in the Breeders’ Cup Mile, but the well-bred French import is peaking for this test. He has won five of eight starts this year, including recent stakes wins at Hollywood Park and Bay Meadows and a second behind Expelled in the Eddie Read Handicap at Del Mar.

If either horse wins, they might ask Jenine Sahadi to come to the press box for an interview. She won’t have any trouble finding her way.

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Breeders’ Cup 1997, Hollywood Park, Saturday, 10:30 a.m.