Good Horse Sense Puts Her in Right Circles

Time was in this country when sports were a man’s world.

Not any more. Women are into pugilism, basketball, golf, poker, marathons, bodybuilding and baseball.

Used to be the only females in horse racing were the four-footed kind. And even they got a five-pound allowance in the weights.

Horse trainers were guys who wore Stetson hats, boots and chewed tobacco and came from Missouri or Kentucky and they were part Jesse James and part David Harum and all man. It was not too good an idea to buy one of their horses. Or to bet on one, either.

They had the game all to themselves. They liked to work their horses in the predawn darkness not because it was cooler but because their horses were harder to spot and get a stopwatch on.

So you can tell right away, therefore, that Jenine Sahadi can’t be a horse trainer. She’s too young. If you knew she was in the public eye, you’d guess it was as an opera singer or ballet dancer. You’d figure if she had anything to do with a horse, she’d be wearing a black derby hat and chasing foxes on one.

Well, Ms. Sahadi is a long way from being Madame Butterfly or riding to hounds. If you’re looking for her any day soon, try the winner’s circle at Hollywood Park. She has been there, holding the reins of a winner, more times than any trainer at the track. As of this weekend, a rousing 32% of her entries have won. That “J. Sahadi” you see in your program does not stand for “John” or “Joe” or “Jim.” There has never been a successful horse trainer named “Jenine.” Usually, they’re called “Plain Ben,” or “Sunny Jim” or or sometimes just “Silent Sam.” Or “Syringe Sam.”

If Sahadi has a horse in the race, don’t wait for a price. Her horses win three of every 10. If you’re a show bettor, it’s even better. Her horses were in the money 48% of the time last time I looked.

It’s not a hobby with Sahadi. She has more than 70 horses under her supervision. She trains for, among others, an Arabian potentate, Prince Ahmed Salman. The prince has Sahadi for one reason: She wins.

You probably get some idea where Sahadi is coming from when you know that her graduation present in high school was not a wristwatch or a bracelet. It was a race horse. Dad, Fred Sahadi, raised them on his breeding farm in Los Gatos.

Some graduates probably would have liked to exchange it for a Cadillac, but Sahadi felt as if she’d been given a bag of diamonds. She hasn’t been 10 feet from a horse since. She went to Kentucky to college because it was closer to the great breeding farms and she spent more time in a paddock than in a library but, when she transferred to USC, she majored in journalism. She still didn’t get far from a finish line, getting a job in the publicity department at Hollywood Park charting past performances and acting as liaison between the officials and the backstretch.

It occurred to Sahadi that training horses was not exactly quantum physics. “Horses are not complicated,” she says, “people are.”

In her case, it was true. She had no difficulty with the horses. Not so the trainers. Some of them tried to talk potential clients out of turning their stables over to her. A horse would not respond to a woman, they warned. Horses have to be shown who’s boss.

Sahadi would not disagree entirely. Some of her methods differ totally, however. She shies away from corporal punishment. If she had her way, whips would not be carried by riders.

She has had her share of rogue horses, even some psychos. Horses are like teenagers everywhere, they like to defy authority.

Her most famous horse, Lit De Justice, who won the Breeders’ Cup Sprint last year, was the class cutup who liked to pull such stunts as stopping running at the five-eighths pole and trying to unseat his rider. Just when people were about to sell him to the rodeo, Sahadi got him some psychiatric help from the track shrink, Karl Webster. She also put jockey Corey Nakatani on him. “Corey was a two-footed Lit De Justice,” she explains. “He was as mischievous, unpredictable, used to doing it his way as the horse. They got along perfectly.”

She treats her horses like children. She has one filly who is so finicky, she may be anorexic. “She just picks at her food,” Sahadi worries.

She has no such problems with the colts. She feeds them M&M;’s, Hershey bars, Oreos. “They have a sweet tooth,” she says.

They sure do. One of them, Jewel’s Reward, bit the little finger off owner Elizabeth Arden Graham once when she came around with a sugar cube, prompting Jackie Westrope to observe, “He just heard lady fingers were sweet.”

Today is “Super Sunday” at Hollywood Park, with four big races worth an aggregate $1.4 million--the Swaps Stakes with Kentucky Derby veterans Hello and Free House in the field, the Sunset Handicap at a mile and a half, the Vanity Handicap and the Hollywood Juvenile probably full of next year’s Kentucky Derby horses.

Guess who has the co-favorites in two of them (Rainbow Dancer in the Sunset; Majorbigtimesheet in the Juvenile)?

The best horsewoman this side of Annie Oakley.