Lady Still in Waiting

This is what everyone talks about: the long walk, so tense with anticipation, as the horses and their trainers file from the barns to the paddock before the Kentucky Derby, rounding the turn to see the twin spires of Churchill Downs and a crowd of 150,000 waiting.

“Come on, Jenine!” a man called out from the rail at Jenine Sahadi, the trainer of The Deputy and only the 10th woman to saddle a horse for the Derby.

“She’s got her game face on,” a woman said as Sahadi passed.

This is what no one talks about: the long walk back to the barn after what sometimes is not the most exciting two minutes in sports.

So much buildup, so much preparation. So . . . what happened?

“I never really saw,” Sahadi said as she walked back to the barn through the crowd with her husband Ben Cecil’s arm around her after The Deputy--the winner of the Santa Anita Derby and the second choice behind winner Fusaichi Pegasus at 9-2--finished 14th.

“I saw them as they went by me, down the backside, and I knew he was going nowhere and I basically quit watching,” Sahadi said.

“He did his best. [Jockey Chris McCarron] said he seemed to to be struggling, but we don’t know just why yet. He looks like he came out of the race OK.”

After such a sub-par performance, a veterinarian was scheduled to examine the horse to look for any reasons.

But the race was long done.

They’re off--and it’s over.

“That’s the beauty, if you want to call it beauty, of the Kentucky Derby,” Sahadi said with a wry smile.

Now you understand why Neil Drysdale, who trains Fusaichi Pegasus, watched the race on the big screen.

Sahadi, 37, watched from a box with her husband and two brothers, a few friends and an ABC camera and Lesley Visser at close quarters.

Cecil--a trainer himself and the nephew of English trainer Henry Cecil--had his arm around his wife long before it was over, when she gave a little shrug and they headed for the barn.

“Good job, keep your head up, nothing to be ashamed of,” a track worker said as she passed by. Sahadi didn’t hide her disappointment.

“It’s too much pressure--a lot on me, a lot on the horse,” Sahadi said. “I feel bad for everybody.”

With her warm wit, unorthodox ways and media savvy honed in her days in publicity at Hollywood Park, Sahadi was the new star of the Churchill Downs backstretch this year as she tried to become the first female trainer to win the Derby.

Nine others have tried before her--she was the fourth in the last five years--with Shelley Riley’s Casual Lies finishing second in 1992.

Sahadi is a different sort of trainer, but hardly because she wears her diamond ring in the barn--five carats, if you must ask--or because she chose a blue Escada suit for the Derby. (Nobody was checking the labels on the suits of Wayne Lukas, another noted clothes horse.)

It’s not only because she gives her horses peppermints, either, a trick she picked up from Charlie Whittingham.

“He’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a human who could talk to the animals, a Dr. Doolittle,” Sahadi said of the trainer who won the Derby with Ferdinand in 1986 and Sunday Silence in 1989 before his death last year.

Sahadi didn’t have to win the Derby to make her mark as a trainer. She already had made history before she reached the Derby, becoming the first female trainer to win a Breeders’ Cup race when she won with Lit De Justice in 1996. She won again the next year with Elmhurst, and last month, she became the only female trainer to win the Santa Anita Derby, setting up The Deputy’s trip to Louisville.

“The best thing about her is she’s open-minded, very creative,” said Barry Irwin, head of Team Valor, the syndicate that co-owns The Deputy. “A lot of people, you give them a horse, and they pigeonhole the horse, thereby taking away possibilities. She’s open-minded. She lets the horse tell her what to do.”

Truth be told, Sahadi’s horse--an Irish-bred colt that sold for $25,000 as a yearling--was a much longer shot than she was to be at Churchill Downs.

“His pedigree, he doesn’t come from the royal family,” said John Hills, who was The Deputy’s trainer in England and watched the race from Berkshire. “But he was always a lovely horse.”

Sahadi grew up around racing--her family’s Cardiff Stud Farm co-owned Desert Wine, the horse that finished second to Sunny’s Halo in the 1983 Derby.

Her brother Stephen owns Cardiff Stud Farm now, and though he made the long walk to the paddock with Desert Wine in ‘83, this was different.

“Much,” he said, as he and another brother, Scott, followed behind their sister. “I actually could start crying.”

Barn 41

Forty-eight barns sprawl beyond the backstretch at Churchill Downs.

It is a community unto itself, complete with a track kitchen and a building where stablehands can hold chapel services or take classes when the place isn’t overrun by Derby onlookers and radio stations doing live remotes. LOVE 102.3, Star 98.9, 95.7 Classic Rock.

The Deputy’s home for almost a month was Barn 41, Stall 12.

A fancy neighborhood, because the horse in Stall 21 was the favorite, Fusaichi Pegasus--the $4-million yearling as famous for his unpredictable antics as his victory in the Wood Memorial at Aqueduct last month.

Sometimes the horses’ paths crossed--like the day Sahadi offered Pegasus a peppermint after the high-strung colt turned around as she unwrapped one for The Deputy.

Drysdale, a droll Englishman, said Pegasus couldn’t have one: “He told me he only eats health food,” Sahadi said.

Derby Week began with the air full of hot-air balloons in the shapes of such things as a cow and a birthday cake and a bottle of Early Times whiskey.

But things were still quiet at Churchill Downs when The Deputy arrived April 12, only four days after winning the Santa Anita Derby, making the trip on a windowless plane configured with stalls.

Groom Octavio Camargo was along for the flight, which can cost from $3,500 to more than $10,000, depending on how many horses are on board for a journey occasionally so arduous an unruly horse must be tranquilized.

The Deputy, typically unperturbable, did fine, and Sahadi arrived a day later, setting up residence at the Brown Hotel for most of the next month.

A couple of barns over from Sahadi on the backside was Lukas, the four-time Derby winner.

When Sahadi asked, Lukas--whose wife, Laura, trains quarter horses at Los Alamitos--talked with her about all the strategies of the Derby, from when to ship a horse to handling the hubbub that builds toward the race.

“There’s always a lot of talk, a lot of information,” Lukas warned her. “You just have to continue to do what you do. You can’t get caught up in that BS. You have to cut through all that.”

Sahadi listened closely.

“The guy has been amazing,” she said. “Most guys would be, ‘Ah, I can’t be bothered.’ He has offered me everything in his barn if I’ve forgotten anything. It reminds me of how Charlie [Whittingham] was, very secure of himself, not at all afraid to be helpful.”

Just far enough away from Sahadi’s barn for her never to have to pass by was Barn 33, home to Bob Baffert. The silver-haired trainer of Derby winners Silver Charm and Real Quiet ignited a controversy when he made an offhand remark before the Santa Anita Derby, asking McCarron who was training The Deputy--Sahadi or McCarron--prompting Sahadi to walk out of the news conference, fed up with the old insinuations she needed any help.

“When she walked off mad, I realized what I had done,” said Baffert, who contends he was only responding in jest to a remark by McCarron.

“They turned it into a sexist deal, which it wasn’t,” Baffert said. “I had to bite the bullet. Everybody got their shot at me.”

Baffert rode out the week.

“Nobody’s ever questioned her training ability,” he said.

“This race is a career maker. I won the Breeders’ Cup and nobody cared. After I won the Kentucky Derby, people knew me.”

Avoiding Trouble

By sunup on the backside, steam rises from the backs of horses being bathed after early trips to the track.

Sahadi arrived each morning around 6.

Camargo, the groom, rose at 5 without an alarm clock, waking to start the coffee maker in the small room of the barn he shared with Manny Rotela, The Deputy’s exercise rider, not 20 feet from The Deputy’s stall.

Some trainers played a bit of cat-and-mouse, with Lukas declining to use saddlecloths with the horses’ names on them in hopes of a little anonymity, and Drysdale known for taking his colts out while it’s still dark.

But Sahadi preferred to go out at 8:30 after the track-renovation break, when the colt could step onto the newly harrowed surface like a skater stepping onto the ice behind a Zamboni.

At 8:15, The Deputy could be found standing still as a statue at the entrance to the track, waiting for it to reopen.

“This is his little ritual,” Sahadi said.

Onlookers marveled at the calmness of the colt as he stood patiently in front of the gate with Rotela in the saddle.

“He’s quiet. A lot of class,” Rotela said.

Sahadi took it all in, a ritual of her own.

“Some horses you wouldn’t bring out here early, with all the people,” she said. “A horse that would be anxious, you’d wait until you could walk straight onto the track.”

Three and a half weeks seems like a long time to be in residence for a two-minute race, but the idea is to acclimate the horse to the track and the environment and keep him sound and fit.

The last of The Deputy’s three timed workouts was a five-furlong breeze in a minute flat the Tuesday before the race, with McCarron up after flying in from California the night before.

“To my eyes, since I haven’t seen him in a week, he looks awesome,” McCarron said, pleased that The Deputy was holding his weight and still strong, but not fattening up.

The trainers were in fine-tuning mode, trying simply to maintain their horses’ conditions.

But their real concern was avoiding the sort of small mishap that can become a big disaster.

Thursday morning before the race, a shiver went up every trainer’s spine.

Globalize, the horse that was supposed to be on the rail, was kicked in the leg by his companion pony, suffering a cut that required him to be scratched from the race.

“Two days out, you’re in the Kentucky Derby, you go to the track, and the next thing you know, you’re out,” Sahadi said.

“The rest of all this is peripheral. The only thing I care about is making it through each day.

“Step on a rock the wrong way, you’re out. Get a fever, you’re out. Roll in the stall wrong, you’re out. Or when you’re out grazing, something spooks him and he goes up. Anything. You could list hundreds of things that could go wrong. You pray to God it doesn’t.”

Some of the precautions Sahadi took included protective bandages on The Deputy’s legs, and special pads for his front feet that were changed only the day before the race.

As Derby Day approached, the final preparations were made.

The Deputy merely walked the shed Wednesday, galloping the next two days, and Sahadi took her horse to the paddock area before other races Wednesday and Friday to “school” him, or familiarize him with the race-day setting.

That same day, Camargo added the finishing touches, braiding The Deputy’s mane.

“I’m not nervous. I know my horse has a very good chance,” Sahadi said as the day drew near. “But in my mind, it’s like a gazillion-to-one, because I really believe this is the toughest race in the world to win.”

Grazing Time

After the hectic mornings, afternoons were Sahadi’s time.

She returned to the barns around 3:30, after a nap at her hotel. The stable area is quiet then, and millions of dollars’ worth of horses graze calmly in the small yard behind the stables, as peaceful as any child’s pony.

“I love coming back here in the afternoons and just watching him graze,” Sahadi said.

A couple of men in light blue work shirts with their names stitched on patches hung by the fence one day.

“How you doing, Ms. Sahadi? My hat’s off to you,” one said.

Sahadi chatted with them, and they came around to one conclusion.

“I think the racing gods have already decided who will win it,” she said. “We just don’t know who yet.”

If the racing gods had a good story in mind, wouldn’t it be Sahadi and her Irish colt?

Sahadi shook her head.

“The story is over there,” she said, pointing toward Barn 42, the home of Hal’s Hope, trained by 88-year-old Harold Rose.

Even during grazing time, a cellular phone was never far from Sahadi’s ear.

She had business to attend to at home, where two horses she trains, Spinelessjellyfish and Sweet Ludy, won races in California while she was away.

The afternoons ended with The Deputy’s dinner, oats the way he likes them--cooked--with a Dixie Cup of inexpensive wine poured over them.

“I think it’s Almaden, from a box,” Sahadi said. “They were out of burgundy. It’s white zin.”

Around 4:30, the day was done.

“Good night. Be a good boy,” she told The Deputy. “I’m so proud of you.”

Feeding the Media

Put it this way--a horse has less of an appetite.

Every morning, as early as 6, reporters and camera crews stopped by Sahadi’s barn.

Not so many questions were about the horse.

“I’ve been asked, ‘What are you going to wear? How many carats is that ring? Is that a Rolex? Are you going to wear a hat?’ ” Sahadi said.

Writers from the Daily Racing Form, the local press and major national papers were more likely to ask about The Deputy’s workout schedule or Sahadi’s thoughts on post positions--but also about the exchange with Baffert and being a woman trainer.

“Yes, I am a woman and yes, I am a trainer. I’m not conscious of that all the time. This is not a political statement,” she said.

“If I spent a lot of time thinking about being a woman here, I’d wake up and say there are 126 years of history working against me instead of for me.”

Later she put it more indelicately.

“If you spent your time thinking about things, you’d be throwing up.”

“The woman thing,” as Sahadi calls it, had its allure.

The Derby queen and her court visited. So did Miss America, Heather French.

The Oxygen cable network did a segment, with The Deputy insisting on rubbing his head on Sahadi’s shoulder as the camera rolled.

Lifetime cable network visited.

So did ESPN, asking Sahadi to wear a mike as she watched The Deputy on the track.

ABC’s “World News Tonight” miked her as well, piquing Sahadi’s interest most.

“I’m kind of smitten with Peter Jennings,” she admitted. “I’ve got a habit of saying, ‘Good night, Peter.’

“I’m pretty sure I’m going to be on the, “And finally. . . . ‘ “

Thursday evening, Sahadi hung on Jennings’ final words:

” . . . Finally, this evening, we’re going to go to Louisville, Kentucky . . . “

Earlier that day, her cell phone rang.

“Jenine?”

It was Jennings.

“If I didn’t know your voice so well, I’d think it was a joke,” she told him.

“When he called, I just about died.”

Two days before the race, with the ubiquitous cell phone to her ear, Sahadi was doing a radio show, listening to yet another tough question.

“I don’t know what’s in a mint julep,” she said. “But if you tasted one, you probably wouldn’t care.”

The Draw

On Wednesday, trainers put aside their jeans for suits and gathered with well-heeled owners, jockeys and a crowd of onlookers for the draw at the Kentucky Derby Museum, adjacent to the track.

Sahadi, looking more tense than she had all week, sat in an uncomfortable white wooden lawn chair flanked by Irwin and McCarron, whose thinning reddish hair was still damp after riding in the ninth race on the afternoon’s card.

Sahadi, Irwin and McCarron would have to wait until 15th to choose a post position in the unusual two-tiered draw: Sahadi hid her disappointment with a wan smile for a camera.

She had hoped to be somewhere between positions 5 and 12. Instead, the choice looked as if it would be between being in the auxiliary gate--Nos. 15 through 20--or close to the rail.

It didn’t help that Captain Steve, the Baffert-trained colt who finished third in the Santa Anita Derby but impressed Sahadi with his progress at Churchill Downs, drew the first selection and chose the No. 8 post position.

Fusaichi Pegasus had the 12th selection, and Drysdale picked a position in the auxiliary gate for his famously fidgety horse, taking No. 16, away from the crowd.

The Deputy’s turn: The choices were 1, 11, 17, 18, 19 and 20.

“Seventeen,” McCarron said as Irwin prepared to walk to the front of the room to make his selection.

Irwin stood up.

“Barry!” Sahadi suddenly called after him.

The reason was quickly clear: Post position 17 was right next to Fusaichi Pegasus, who delayed the start of the Wood Memorial when he was reluctant to walk to the starting gate and threw a rider at Churchill Downs the week before the race.

McCarron and Sahadi had talked about it only that morning.

“Eleven!” Sahadi said after quickly conferring with McCarron.

Irwin took 11, and McCarron leaned over when he returned.

“Very good audible she called,” he said.

A day later, The Deputy moved to No. 10, just outside War Chant and More Than Ready--after Globalize was scratched.

“You move one in and you go from loading first to loading last,” Sahadi said. “That’s a huge benefit.”

After the draw, for the first time, Sahadi begged off a news conference, leaving for dinner with McCarron and his wife, Judy.

“I tell you, I’m completely exhausted,” she said.

Usually, three or four hours’ sleep is enough for her, but that night, Judy McCarron found a pill to help her sleep, and Sahadi went to bed at 10 p.m. and got up at 5 a.m.--her longest night.

Derby Day

First light at Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in May. Can a horse know it’s Derby Day?

“He knows he’s running the minute you braid his hair,” Sahadi said shortly after arriving about 10 minutes after 6, wearing jeans, sneakers and a yellow Polo sweat shirt.

“Are you going to be a good boy for me today?” she asked The Deputy, slipping him two peppermints as her husband went to attend to his own horse, Falcon Flight, who was running in the seventh race, immediately before the Derby.

“Everything all quiet last night?” Sahadi asked Camargo, who already had taken The Deputy’s temperature, as he does every morning.

Veterinarian Alex Harthill stopped by to check on him and speak to Sahadi.

“Ready for the day?” he asked the horse.

Sahadi kept The Deputy away from the commotion of the track, and just had him walk the shed before Camargo gave him a bath.

“I’ll be back around 1:30 or 2,” she told the groom as she and Cecil left to rest at the hotel and avoid the Derby Day crowd. “I’ve got my phone if you need me.”

They returned by early afternoon.

“She’s been amazingly calm,” her husband said.

“Until I barfed about an hour ago,” Sahadi said.

“Jenine’s nervous enough for everyone,” her brother Scott said.

Gary Barber, the Hollywood producer of “The Sixth Sense” who co-owns The Deputy with Team Valor, waited at the barn to make the walk over.

“I’ve already received eight scripts about racing and the Derby,” Barber said. “None of them are good.”

Then Cecil left with his horse for the seventh race--the Woodford Reserve Turf Classic--and Sahadi waited anxiously until she slipped into a room in the barn to watch on TV.

At Santa Anita the day The Deputy won the Santa Anita Derby, Falcon Flight won his race too.

Not this time.

“No, he’s not going to get there,” Sahadi said with disappointment as she watched the horses down the stretch. “He’s going to run second.”

With his horse running in the previous race, Cecil couldn’t make the walk to the paddock with Sahadi, but he was waiting when she arrived.

“No other horse got quite the reception,” he said. “That was kind of nice.”

And They’re Off

They start playing “My Old Kentucky Home” as the horses leave the paddock.

“Anybody who tells you he doesn’t get butterflies is lying to you,” said McCarron, who has ridden in 17 Derbies, winning on Alysheba in 1987 in a masterful ride by avoiding disaster after clipping heels with Bet Twice, and again on Go For Gin in 1994.

He didn’t have a winner this time.

The Deputy broke fine, but never really challenged.

“I don’t have any excuses for him,” McCarron said after stopping to speak quickly with Sahadi. “He just didn’t run. He ran the worst race of his career, and he picked the biggest day of his career to do it. It’s very disappointing.

“I was just going backwards.”

Sahadi headed off to track down the horse.

“After he came by me the first time, I thought he was OK,” she said. “Down the backside, I could see he was struggling. I think Chris knew he was out of horse on the backstretch.”

Jeff Siegel, a handicapper who heads Team Valor along with Irwin, a former turf writer, wondered if The Deputy’s turf breeding finally caught up with him, even though the horse won three of four races on dirt after coming to the United States, losing only to Fusaichi Pegasus in the San Felipe Stakes at Santa Anita.

“It looked to me like the horse really resented all that dirt,” Siegel said.

“When he hit the far turn, he was done, and Chris did the smart thing and took ahold of him.”

The lingering question was whether something was wrong.

“He’s fine. Just very, very tired,” Sahadi said after checking on him in the testing barn, but she spoke to Harthill and scheduled an endoscopic examination to see if the horse bled or had some other difficulty.

“I wish he could talk, but he can’t, so we will scope him,” she said “I feel bad for my horse.”

The first leg of the Triple Crown was over.

But there won’t be a Preakness for The Deputy.

“I’m anxious to get home,” Sahadi said.

“I want to go home, and take my horse with me.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

No Roses for Them

A look at how female trainers have fared in the Kentucky Derby:

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Year Horse Trainer Finish 1937 No Sir Mary Hirsch 13th 1949 Senecas Coin Mrs. Albert Roth DNF 1965 Mr. Pak Mary Keim 6th 1984 Biloxi Indian Dianne Carpenter 12th 1985 Fast Account Patti Johnson 4th 1988 Kingpost Dianne Carpenter 14th 1992 Casual Lies Shelley Riley 2nd 1996 In Contention Cynthia Reese 15th 1998 Hanuman Highway Kathy Walsh 7th 1999 K One King Akiko Gothard 8th 2000 The Deputy Jenine Sahadi 14th

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