We covered Henry Kaiser’s passion, boat racing, in the Kaiser era chapter of this book.  As you probably recall, we detailed the joy Henry and his family got from that expensive hobby.  Kaiser pursued his hobby well-beyond the hobbyist level to compete in national and international competitions.  Henry Kaiser’s eldest son, Edgar, finally reached the holy grail, winning the National Championship of Unlimited Power Boat Racing in 1957, followed by the Gold Cup in 1958 in Hawaii Kai III.

 

Fred Sahadi’s money-sink of choice was horse racing.  Horse racing was to Sahadi and his children as wooden boat racing had been to the Henry Kaiser and his sons.  What began as a lark and a hobby became an all-consuming passion, and ultimately a business.  Similar to Kaiser’s introduction to boating as a young man, Sahadi started attending horse races at the Del Mar track in Southern California while he and Helen were still in college at UCLA in the late 1950’s.  Unlike Kaiser, Sahadi did not have to wait more than 30 years to indulge his passion for the sport.

 

As soon as he graduated from law school, Sahadi got involved in horse racing by purchasing a horse at auction in xxxx, which he named “Cardiff Jester”.  Fred has no recollection of how he and Helen came up with that name for the horse.  Perhaps it was because they would have driven through the small beach town of Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California on their way to the Del Mar Racetrack from the Los Angeles area.  However the name was chosen, it seemed to suit the horse well as he went on to win his first 7 races, and Fred was hooked on racing.  More horses followed quickly and Sahadi soon needed a place to train and board his expanding stable.  His first “starter” horse farm was on a 20-acre plot in Los Gatos, California in the late 1960’s.

 

Sahadi’s first big horse racing break came in 1972 when he acquired a horse he named “Agitate” at the Keeneland Summer Sale of Yearlings for $65,000 ($435,240).  Agitate would go on to have a very successful racing career, earning more than $1.8 million in today’s dollars.  His most notable racing finishes were a win at the Hollywood Invitational and a third-place finish in the 1974 Kentucky Derby.

By this point, Sahadi’s racing success had outgrown his small farm in Los Gatos so he purchased a 100-acre farm in the Santa Ynez Valley City of Solvang in 1973 very near his friend Ronald Regan’s ranch.  His racing activities expanded significantly at the new facilities, where he typically had 25 to 30 horses in training at any one time.  And his horses were piling up wins as he became recognized as a major player in the California racing community.  But Sahadi’s notoriety extended well beyond the California border; he now regularly raced horses in France and England as well as at all the major tracks in the United States.  In one particularly memorable episode, he was honored to be invited to fellow racing enthusiast Queen Elizabeth’s tent at the Epsom Derby in England to view his horses racing in the Derby.

 

By the late 1970’s Sahadi had three major points of focus: his extensive commercial real estate development portfolio, his successful and expanding horse racing activities, and his new-found focus, Fleur du Lac.  Clearly his two King Air airplanes were getting a workout flitting from the Bay Area to the horse farm in Solvang to Lake Tahoe.  But now even the 100-acre farm at Solvang had become too small for Sahadi’s racing and breeding operations.  Thinking big as was typical, Sahadi set about building what he termed a “world class, Kentucky-type thoroughbred facility in California”.  He acquired a 1,200-acre parcel in Creston, California (Paso Robles) in 1984 and set out on elaborate plans for his new horse farm.  Since design and construction work at Fleur du Lac was winding down after the completion of phase one, Sahadi moved one of his lieutenants from the Fleur du Lac project, Nick Kromaydis, to Creston, where work proceeded at a break neck pace.  Soon there were foaling barns, stallion barns, breeding barns, brood mare barns, yearling barns, yearling run-in sheds, training barns, a covered viewing arena, and even a full-size race track.  These were not simple structures, many had spires reminiscent of Kentucky horse racing country architecture, all surrounded by a black-painted wood rail fence in an interesting contrast to the white wood rail fences typical of Kentucky horse farms.  It was as Sahadi called it “the Taj Mahal of California horse racing”.  Sahadi named his fabulous new facility Cardiff Stud Farm, and his horse operations reached a peak at the new world class facility.  There were typically more than 500 mares and yearlings at Cardiff, all owned by Sahadi.

 

Sahadi’s racing record is stellar.  His horses won well over 100 stakes races, finished second and third at the Kentucky Derby, second at the Preakness, and won most of the great races at the tier just below the big three: Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont Stakes.  Some of Sahadi’s most famous and successful horses were Agitate (third at 1974 Kentucky Derby; career winnings of $1.65 million ($9.4 million)), Desert Wine (second place in both Kentucky Derby and Preakness in 1983; career winnings of $4.2 million ($11.8 million); swept all the big races as a four year old including the Californian and the Hollywood Gold Cup), Flying Paster (syndicated for $57.8 million in today’s dollars), Gummo (one of the most successful California race horses in history), King Pellinore, Caucasus, Bold Tropic, Golden Act, The Carpenter, Princess Karenda, Croeso, Al Mamoon, Skywalker, Flamenco Wave, Itsallgreektome, Letthebighossroll, Smokester and Free House, to name just a few.

 

It was a wonderful time for the Sahadi family as Jenine, Sahadi’s oldest daughter, had become a well-known horse trainer in her own right, and Steven had come right out of UCLA to help manage Cardiff Stud Farm.  Jenine continued to be one of the premier trainers in the United States for 15 years, and was the first female to be successful in that role in horse racing, including being only the ninth woman to ever train a Kentucky Derby participant in over 125 years in 2000.  She was at the forefront of the movement against medicating horses with performance-enhancing drugs, a stand that shortened her career in the sport.

 

While at the same time managing a growing and highly successful horse breeding and racing business at Cardiff Stud Farm, and wrapping up construction and sales at Fleur du Lac, Sahadi found the time and energy to create what would become known as the premier regional thoroughbred horse sales center in California.  Named after Sahadi’s oldest son Steven Barrett Sahadi, Barretts Equine Sales was created over a nine-month period in 1989 on a 21-acre parcel at the Fairplex grounds in Pomona, California, site of the Los Angeles Fair.  From the time of its first auction in March of 1990 to its final auction on October 16, 2018, Barretts provided a convenient location for racing enthusiasts to acquire the best California breeders had to offer with annual sales often topping $250 million ($405 million).  After a tiff with new Los Angeles Fair management in 2002, Sahadi sold Barretts to the Fair for $15.8 million ($24.7 million).  Without the entrepreneurial drive of Sahadi at the helm of Barretts, sales started a steady decline.

 

By the time he sold Barretts, Sahadi was well on his way out of the horse business.  He later explained that there were two primary reasons for his loss of interest.  First, “the industry was not kind to us”.  Although as a newcomer Sahadi had been well-received world-wide, the hide-bound California racing community refused to accept this brash newcomer.  Even with his creation of Barretts, a recognized improvement for the horse industry in California, and the creation of the Taj Mahal of horse breeding at Cardiff Stud Farm, Sahadi felt that he did not get the local support his operations warranted.  Sahadi’s operations at Cardiff were on the top 10 Breeders List and top ten Owners List every year the facility was owned by Sahadi, yet the operation began to lose money.  Sahadi later said that the mistake he made was to build Cardiff Stud Farm in California rather than in Kentucky, where it would have been a tremendous success and would probably still be in operation.  Second, Sahadi recognized that the horse racing and breeding industry in California was no longer a growing business, and in fact, showed alarming signs of decline.  Race tracks throughout California were closing.  Sales at Barretts had shown steady decline.  Public support for horse racing in California was in decline.  It was time to move on.

 

A large portion (724 acres) of Cardiff Stud Farm was sold to Alex Trebek of television game-show Jeopardy fame in 1996.  Although Trebek had no experience in horse racing, he simply fell in love with the property and enjoyed it for almost ten years.  He sold the property for $10 million ($14.4 million) in 2005 to an investor group with a business plan to bring a large, Kentucky-style, horse racing track to the property.  Apparently, this group did not get the memo from Sahadi about the dying horse racing business in California, and their plan quickly failed.  The investor group then renamed the property Windfall Farms with the intent to divide the 700 plus acres into 75, 10-acre “gentleman farms” with either cattle raising, horse racing or wine making focus.  That idea failed as well.

 

Steven and Jenine were the last Sahadi family standard bearers in the horse business.  After the sale of the main portion of Cardiff, Steven moved the remaining Sahadi horse operations to a 150-acre farm near Atascadero.  That operation is now closed as well, and the Sahadi family is completely out of the business.

 

The parallels between Fred Sahadi in the horse business and Henry Kaiser in boat racing are remarkable.  Both men got a taste of their future passions as a young man without the financial ability to pursue their interest.  Both self-made men earned the wealth that allowed them to pursue their youth passions, and moved boldly to the top of their respective hobby’s field.  Then the tide turned.  In Kaiser’s case, age and a new wife changed his focus to Hawaii and business interests.  In Sahadi’s case, declining prospects for horse racing in California, the sense that his personal financial exposure to racing had become too large, the realization that he had reached the top of the hobby without too many more trophies to win, and the crush of difficult conditions in his primary real estate business compounded by the pressures of difficult times at the Fleur du Lac project all played a role in Sahadi’s decision.  Today, Sahadi seems content and very proud of what he and his family were able to accomplish in horse racing.

 

It is important to note that most of what you have just read about Sahadi’s horse racing adventure was happening at the same time he pursued another adventure, recreating Fleur du Lac.  It seems very likely that decisions made in racing affected Fleur du Lac and vice-versa.  Unlike Kaiser, Sahadi did not have a massive administrative corps to assist in balancing the three challenges he faced including his primary real estate business, his horse racing pursuits, and his re-development of Fleur du Lac.  To make matters even more difficult for Sahadi, he had decided to pursue a completely different concept in his work on Fleur du Lac, one for which there was no model he could rely on to avoid traps.