By Dick Jerardi
You could not miss the emotion in Santa Anita track announcer Frank Mirahmadi’s voice as the horses hit the wire in Sunday’s fifth race: “Surfin’ USA wins it for the late, great Jeff Siegel and Eric Sondheimer.”
Siegel, who passed away Oct. 4, 2025, was, in my mind, the sharpest handicapper in modern horse racing history. He was a public handicapper for several California newspapers. He was brilliant on TV while working for HRTV. And just as good online when HRTV morphed into XBTV.
If you did not listen to or read about Siegel’s opinions before gambling on a Southern California card, you were making a mistake. He was just as good on the national scene as he was in California. He regularly caused me to reconsider what I thought I knew or suggested something that I had never considered.
Few among his contemporaries would disagree with my characterization of Siegel as the best of us. If that was it, that would be something. But Siegel’s prowess at deciphering races was just a piece of his impact on the sport.
He founded Clover Racing (which morphed into Team Valor) with Barry Irwin. They won the 1989 Santa Anita Handicap with 50-1 Martial Law. Later that year, they won the Breeders’ Cup Turf with Prized. Siegel loved UCLA football and basketball and rarely missed a game. He produced state-of-art recruiting videos of high school basketball players before most had even contemplated such a venture. He was always thinking of the next thing before anybody else had mastered the last thing. The only thing he may never have been good at was sleep. He just never stopped working.
Irwin bought Siegel’s share of Team Valor a while back, but Siegel still owned a few horses with his friend Sondheimer (the high school writer for the “Los Angeles Times”). And he loved the Beachboys. Thus, it was Surfin’ USA to win that maiden special weight race on the grass for the Estate of Jeff Siegel and Eric Sondheimer.
In this sport, the best gift is an ability to see the future. To have any chance of doing that, you need to have a past that is filled with experiences to file away for the right moment. When Justify, making his debut, broke his maiden Feb. 18, 2018 at Santa Anita, Siegel went to Bob Baffert and said: “you’re going to win the Derby.”
Exactly 76 days later, Justify won the Kentucky Derby, And 111 days after Siegel’s initial prediction, Justify won the Triple Crown.
He was just like that. None of it was by chance. He watched race and workout videos constantly. He knew what he had seen, and because of that, he knew what we were about to see.
There are very few people in any walk of life that are actually irreplaceable. Siegel, who was 74 when he died, is the exception. It is impossible to replicate his knowledge of and passion for the sport. There will never be another. He was an absolute original.
And I am proud to say he was my friend. In fact, he was everybody’s friend. He had seen and done it all, but he wanted everybody in the game to succeed, so he was more than willing to answer any question, suggest any direction that might point toward success.
Very soon, Siegel should take his place in the “Joe Hirsch Media Roll of Honor” in the Hall of Fame. And if anybody ever deserved a Special Eclipse and/or an Eclipse Award of Merit, it is Jeff Siegel, the Sage of Santa Anita.
