I’ll be honest about how this one starts, because anything else would be a lie, and lying isn’t something I do in this space.
I didn’t know Fred Sahadi. Never met him, never sat with him, never had the kind of conversation that lets you write from the gut about a man instead of from a press release. When the news broke that he’d died on June 4 at 91, at his home in Los Gatos, I read it the way most of you probably did, a name attached to a place, Cardiff Stud Farm, that I knew mattered without being able to tell you exactly why it mattered, or how much.
So I sat on it. While the trade outlets ran their notices and ran them well, I’ll give credit where it’s due, I stayed quiet, because I don’t do the thing where you pretend to have known someone for the sake of it. That’s just noise dressed up as eulogy.
But here’s what I do know. I know Jenine Sahadi. And once I started pulling the thread on who her father actually was, not the three-paragraph version, but the whole shape of the man, I understood something that changed how I needed to write this. This wasn’t a story about a breeder who died. This was a story about where Jenine came from, and why everyone in this business who’s spent time around her could have told you, without ever meeting Fred, exactly what kind of man raised her.
The Man Who Built It Twice
Fred Sahadi’s California story didn’t begin with money. It began with a kid who got interested in horse racing around age 12 and then did something most people in this game never do, he waited. He didn’t jump in before he could afford the fall. He bought 20 acres in Los Gatos, built something else first, construction, and only when the foundation under him was solid did he walk into the sales ring.
That ring was Keeneland, summer of 1972. The hammer fell on a $65,000 colt by Advocator, out of a Swaps mare named Give or Take. Sahadi named him Agitate. A year later he sold the horse at a loss, $55,000 at a 2-year-old sale and watched Agitate go on to win the Hollywood Derby and the California Derby, then run third in the Kentucky Derby behind Cannonade. That’s how Cardiff Stud Farm got its name and its start: not with a windfall, but with a horse Sahadi sold too early and still got famous off of. There’s something almost poetic in that the farm’s signature horse was the one that got away, and it still made the name.
From there, Cardiff became one of the defining breeding operations in California racing. Sahadi built it first in the Santa Ynez Valley, and when he wanted more room, not more money, more room, he found 1,200 acres up near Creston, outside Paso Robles, years before that country became wine-country. He put up four barns with copper cupolas and wood paneling inside. That’s not a man building a tax shelter. That’s a man building a place he intended to be permanent.
The roster of stallions that stood at Cardiff over the years reads like a tour through California’s golden era: Gummo, Flying Paster, Desert Wine, Skywalker, Free House. Flying Paster alone is worth stopping on, the 1978 California-bred Horse of the Year and champion 2-year-old, a Grade 1 winner of the Santa Anita Derby, the Hollywood Derby, the San Antonio Stakes, who had the misfortune of running into Spectacular Bid in the same crop and never beating him. Flying Paster became a millionaire on the track and then stood his entire stud career at Cardiff. Sahadi’s whole operating theory, that California-tested horses could be California-bred stallions wasn’t a slogan. It was Flying Paster’s whole life, start to finish, under one roof.
Cardiff bred Shywing, sold for $1 million and a five-time stakes winner. It became a leading consignor at sales across the state and the country. And in 1989, Sahadi partnered with the Los Angeles County Fair Association to help create what became the Barretts Equine Sales Company in Pomona, a venture that would go on to set a North American juvenile sale record of $2 million for a colt who would become Morocco. Barretts graduates included Unbridled’s Song and Brocco, both Breeders’ Cup Juvenile winners. The fair association eventually bought Sahadi out in 2002, by which point Barretts had already cemented itself as a fixture of the California sales calendarbuilt, in part, by a guy who got into the game at 12 years old and waited until he could do it right.
His son Stephen, whose middle name gave Barretts its name, ran the last two versions of the farm, Creston and Atascadero. This was a family operation in the truest sense, not in the sentimental sense people throw around when they mean “family business” but actually mean “tax structure.” The Sahadis were in the dirt together.
The Daughter Who Did It Her Way — Twice
And then there’s Jenine.
I want to be careful here, because I know her, and I don’t want this to read like I’m trading on that. But I also can’t pretend I don’t know her, because that’s the whole reason this piece exists instead of staying unwritten. So let me just tell you what the record says, and you can decide for yourself whether it sounds like someone who grew up watching her father build something from nothing, twice, and refuse to cut corners either time.
Jenine Sahadi got her trainer’s license in 1993, after working the marketing and publicity side at Hollywood Park and apprenticing under Julio Canani. Her first winner came that May at Hollywood Park with a horse named La Sarcelle. Three years later, she became the first woman to ever train a Breeders’ Cup winner, Lit de Justice, a gray son of El Gran Senor, taking the 1996 Breeders’ Cup Sprint at Woodbine for C.N. and Carol Ray’s Evergreen Farm. The horse had come over from France, where he’d been trained by Alain de Royer-Dupré, and Sahadi turned him into a $1.3 million earner and an American champion.
Here’s the part that should stop you cold if you actually think about how rare it is: she didn’t just do it once. The next year, 1997, at Hollywood Park, she won the Breeders’ Cup Sprint again, with Elmhurst. Different horse, different year, same race, same trainer. To this day she remains the only female trainer ever to win two Breeders’ Cup races. Not “one of the few.” The only one. Two BC Sprints, back to back, with two different horses, as a woman doing it in an era when that fact alone invited a level of scrutiny her male counterparts never had to think about.
And she kept going. In 2000, The Deputy gave her the Santa Anita Derby, making her the first woman to ever saddle a winner of that race, sending the colt on to a 14th-place finish in the Kentucky Derby, which is its own footnote but not the point. The point is she trained Grand Flotilla, Fastness, Rainbow Dancer, Golden Ballet — Fastness, by her own account, the best horse she ever had through her barn, a Shoemaker Mile winner. Elmhurst, meanwhile, was the horse she gelded at five and a half years old mid-career because, in her words, he was “common” and “cheating” and it worked. That’s not a throwaway anecdote. That’s a trainer making a hard, unsentimental call on a Breeders’ Cup-winning animal because she trusted her own read of the horse over the easy path. That’s a Sahadi instinct if I’ve ever heard one.
She walked away in 2011, at 48, with 441 career wins and $26.6 million in purse earnings, at the close of a Del Mar meet, choosing her own exit on her own terms rather than riding it out past the point of meaning anything. “It is bittersweet, but hopefully I’ll be starting something new,” she said at the time. And she meant it — what she started was 26 years (and counting) running the Edwin J. Gregson Foundation, which funds college scholarships for backstretch workers and their families. Built from nothing into something with the resources to actually help people the moment they need it. Sound familiar? That’s the same arc her father ran with Cardiff, start with nothing, build it from the ground up, make it permanent, and don’t walk away from the people who helped you build it.
And when you ask Jenine herself what she’s most proud of, not the two Breeders’ Cup trophies, not the Santa Anita Derby, not the $26 million, it’s the Gregson Foundation. Twenty-six years of quietly making sure backstretch families have a path for their kids. That tells you everything about where her priorities actually sit, and it tells you everything about where she learned to put them there.
The Genes Don’t Lie
I said at the top that I write about racing’s bloodlines and that I believe in them, not in the mystical sense, but in the sense that traits get passed down and developed young, and you can see the lineage in how people carry themselves if you know what to look for.
I didn’t know Fred Sahadi. But I know what patience looks like, the patience to wait until 20 acres in Los Gatos turned into something before you walked into Keeneland with real money. I know what it looks like to build something twice when the first version wasn’t big enough, rather than just be satisfied with “successful enough.” I know what it looks like to take a loss on a horse you believed in and watch it become exactly what you thought it could be anyway and not let that bitterness curdle into anything. And I know what loyalty looks like, because I’ve watched Jenine practice it for years, long after she had any obligation left to practice it for anyone.
Every one of those traits, I now realize, I’ve seen in his daughter. The willingness to do the unglamorous, patient work, building a foundation before chasing the headline. The refusal to be satisfied with “first,” because being first once at the Breeders’ Cup wasn’t the ceiling, it was the floor; she went and did it again. The unsentimental clarity to make a hard call on a good horse because it was the right call, not the easy one. And then, at the absolute peak, 48 years old, two Breeders’ Cup trophies, a Santa Anita Derby, $26 million in the bank, walking away clean to spend the next twenty-plus years building something for people who’ll never make a headline at all.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s a blueprint, handed down.
What Racing Lost
Everyone who wrote about Fred Sahadi this week wrote about Cardiff Stud, and Barretts, and Flying Paster, and the records, and they were right to. Those are the facts, and the facts matter, and I’m not here to tell you those pieces were wrong.
But I think they missed the actual headline, which is this: racing doesn’t produce many people who build something real from a standing start, build it the right way, build it twice when the first wasn’t enough, and then raise a kid who goes out and does the exact same thing in a completely different arena, at a moment when the deck was stacked against her in ways her father never had to face and does it better than anyone before or since.
I came to this story late, and I came to it without ever having shaken Fred Sahadi’s hand. But I came to it knowing his daughter, and having watched her for years without ever quite putting together where that steadiness, that loyalty, that quiet refusal to cut corners actually came from.
Now I know. And now you do too. Twenty-six years into the Gregson Foundation, that’s still the thing she’s proudest of and if you knew Fred Sahadi, you’d know exactly why that checks out.
Rest easy, Fred. Your daughter’s still out there building.
