A Real Prince : Owner Who Comes From Royalty Has Impressive Stable of Fillies

In the Turf Club at Santa Anita the other day, Prince Ahmed Salman took out his wallet--it didn’t appear to be bulging--and produced a snapshot.

Three little girls. Triplets. Just over a year old.

The prince beamed.

Then he produced another snapshot.

Another little girl, 5 years old.

The prince beamed again.

“Is there an omen here?” Salman asked. “I have four daughters and I am running these good fillies in the Breeders’ Cup.”

The prince, a nephew of King Fahd and a member of the ruling family of Saudi Arabia, is big on omens and superstition. The day before this year’s Kentucky Derby, he ran Sharp Cat in the Kentucky Oaks at Churchill Downs and she bore out in the stretch, prompting the stewards to disqualify her, dropping her from third to eighth place.

“He gave an interview before that race,” said his general manager, Richard Mulhall. “Then another time in Kentucky, he gave an interview and he had bad luck. That was the end of the pre-race interviews. After a race, he’ll talk all you want.”

Salman also doesn’t want his picture taken in the paddock before a race. His security people have been known to politely shoo photographers away.

“Why are you then giving this interview?” the prince was asked this day at Santa Anita.

“The Breeders’ Cup is more than a week away,” he said. “But the closer we get to the races, the more superstitious I will become.”

If there’s strength in numbers, bad luck will take the hindmost for Salman in the 14th Breeders’ Cup. In a partnership with Richard Stephen, the women’s sportswear manufacturer from Manhattan Beach, Salman will be running Jewel Princess in the Distaff on Saturday at Hollywood Park, and the prince is running a filly he owns outright, Sharp Cat, in the same race.

Jewel Princess, winner of last year’s Distaff at Woodbine, and Sharp Cat, who has won five stakes in California and one in New York this year, will be coupled in the betting because of the overlapping ownership and could go off the favorite.

Those are Salman’s big guns, but his arsenal includes three others Saturday--Crafty Friend in the Sprint, Fantastic Fellow in the Mile and Double Honor in the Juvenile.

Allen and Madeleine Paulson, who raced two-time horse-of-the-year Cigar, will also have five Breeders’ Cup starters, but few owners get to the paddock that often in this event. The record, held by the late Gene Klein, is seven horses--four in one race--when he came away with a win by Success Express in the Juvenile at Hollywood 10 years ago.

Salman says that he doesn’t care which of his Breeders’ Cup horses wins, but his close associates know better.

“The one he’d really like to see win is Sharp Cat,” said Mulhall, who joined the prince in 1994 after a 36-year training career in California. “Sharp Cat is his baby.”

Sharp Cat, a daughter of Storm Cat out of an Ack Ack mare, was up for auction at the Barretts sale of unraced 2-year-olds in Pomona in 1996. Before the sale, Salman asked the opinion of Wayne Lukas, who hadn’t trained for the prince for several years. Lukas loved Sharp Cat. And he’s trained dozens of Storm Cat’s offspring, among them Tabasco Cat, the Preakness-Belmont winner in 1994.

“That filly [Sharp Cat] is the real goods,” Lukas said. “But she’s not going to be cheap.”

Without blinking or sending home to Riyadh for his allowance, Salman bought Sharp Cat for $900,000, a record for a 2-year-old filly.

Minutes after the gavel dropped, Salman walked over to Lukas and stuffed the signed sales ticket into his breast pocket.

“She’s yours,” he said, and with that Lukas had picked up another plutocrat for a client. Lukas has eight of the prince’s horses in training, and will saddle Double Honor and Fantastic Fellow, besides Sharp Cat, on Saturday.

Jewel Princess and Crafty Friend will be sent over from trainer Wally Dollase’s barn.

Asked Monday to describe Salman, Dollase said: “He’s a comedian.”

Indeed. At Santa Anita, Salman asked with the best deadpan how much a reporter was paying for his interview.

“I am 38 years old,” he said. “But of course I will be 39 on Nov. 17. But I would like to stay 38 for as long as I can.”

Dollase remembers the morning at Hollywood Park when he was scheduled to work Jewel Princess and Crafty Friend.

“The workouts were set for 7:15, sharp, and everybody knew,” he said. “Richard Mulhall was there, another of the prince’s representatives, from Saudi Arabia, was there, but there was no prince.”

Somebody made a phone call.

“I am on the way down to Del Mar,” the prince said.

“Del Mar?” the caller said. “But the workouts are at Hollywood Park.”

“In that case, I will not be able to be there in time,” the prince said.

Finishing the story, Dollase did a charade of a man going to sleep.

At auctions for young horses, Salman is always alert. In the U.S. alone, he spent about $16 million in 1996. There’s more to his wherewithal than family oil. He runs a publishing empire that produces 19 newspapers and magazines and employs 3,000 people. Elle magazine in Arabic will happen soon, the prince said, and he didn’t seem to be kidding.

He holds a degree from UC Irvine and has been racing horses in California, off and on, since the early 1980s. He owns a small farm in Bradbury and a 300-acre place in Saudi Arabia, employs 10 trainers world-wide and won’t say how many horses he owns. That superstition thing again.

His goals are to win the Kentucky Derby and the European classics. One of his brothers, Fahd Salman, won the Epsom Derby with Generous in 1994.

For a time, Sharp Cat seemed destined for this year’s Kentucky Derby. But she ran sixth in the Santa Anita Derby, after a speed duel with Silver Charm, who was second at Santa Anita, first at Churchill Downs.

Lukas, his large stable bereft of any good Kentucky Derby colts this year, wanted to run Sharp Cat.

“She wasn’t good enough to win the Santa Anita Derby, so we never considered the Kentucky Derby,” Salman said. “It was all the media was talking about it.”

Told that reporters were only reflecting what Lukas was saying, Salman said:

“Yes, I suppose that was it. I should know how the media works. I was just letting Lukas talk.”

Last Sunday at Santa Anita, Salman was seen leading Ryafan into the winner’s circle after she had won the Yellow Ribbon Stakes. Ryafan races for her breeder, Juddmonte Farms, which is owned by Prince Khalid Abdullah, Salman’s uncle. Ryafan is a son of Lear Fan, who sired Fantastic Fellow.

“Lear Fan is the reason I am in racing,” Salman said. “He was a very good miler, a Group I winner in France. I bought him for $60,000 and later sold him for $2 million, plus keeping some breeding rights.”

In Salman’s colors, in the first Breeders’ Cup ever run, Lear Fan finished seventh in the Mile at Hollywood Park in 1984. Going into Saturday’s races, that’s one omen the prince can do without.

*

BREEDERS’ CUP

Saturday, 10:30 a.m.

Hollywood Park

Channel 4

*

* MIESZERSKI’S

RACE ANALYSIS

For Jewel Princess, half-owned by Prince Ahmed Salman, it could be a big finish to a big career in the $1-million Distaff, a race the 5-year-old mare won last year. C8