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Horse Sense First, a veterinarian tells trainer Jenine Sahadi ’85 that a horse she owns has gone lame and probably won’t
race again. Then at 9:30 a.m. she learns that a jockey’s illness has left two of her entries riderless in that afternoon’s races. A downcast Sahadi hurries to find substitute riders from her office at Santa Anita Park race track. “It’s been a hell of a morning,” she says.
Yet such discouragement hardly diminishes Sahadi’s love for her work. She has arrived before 6 a.m. at the track beneath the San Gabriel mountains, wearing denims and two jackets against the chill, to oversee horses being worked on the track and being fed, bathed and walked at her barn. She will leave for a few hours at mid-day but return until the races conclude around 5 p.m.
“I love this job,” says Sahadi, 35, long brown hair falling below her shoulders as she stands between barns giving orders to employees. “I just love the animals. They all have different personalities. They don’t talk back. Some of them I’ve had in my barn since I started training four or five years ago. So I see them every day. Sometimes you get more attached to them than to people.”
Apparently Sahadi’s 42 horses reciprocate the feeling. She became the first woman to win a Breeders’ Cup event — and a $1 million race — in 1996. Her earnings of $3,458,176, which ranked 12th nationally, set a record for money won by a female trainer for the second straight year.
SETTING RECORDS was not exactly what Sahadi had in mind growing up on her parents’ breeding farm. “I [just] knew I wanted to be around horses,” she says. After graduating from USC, she worked seven years in marketing and publicity at Hollywood Park before obtaining her trainer’s license in 1993.
Although success came rapidly, she says it did not end sexism at the track.
Many people “want to give credit to someone else because they think a woman is incapable of doing this,” she says. “There’s nothing to this. This is common sense. It’s watching, listening, and knowing your horses and being very realistic about where to run them.”
— Gary Libman
Gary Libman is a Los Angeles-based writer.
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