LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- John Shirreffs carried a photograph of Giacomo in his wallet. Not a trophy. Not a headline. A photograph of a horse most of the racing world had dismissed, a 50-1 shot who had no business winning the Kentucky Derby. And yet, Shirreffs would pull that photo out from time to time, glance at it and say it was like "a Christmas gift that you never tire of opening."
That was John Shirreffs. That tells you a good bit about him. But not everything.
He died Feb. 12, in his sleep, at his home in Arcadia, California, according to The Daily Racing Form. He was 80 years old. And the racing world he had served with such quiet distinction for nearly five decades is immeasurably smaller for his absence.
Louisville | Kentucky | Indiana | Eric Crawford
I was fortunate enough to cover Shirreffs for years. He was easygoing and affable, endlessly patient, always carrying that essential quality that separates great horsemen from merely talented ones: perspective.
Win or lose, praised or criticized, he met the world with the same steady grace. When Giacomo — a horse many of us wrote up as the least distinguished Kentucky Derby winner in memory — was being picked apart by the press, Shirreffs was a bit bemused by the criticism and seemed to absorb it without flinching. That photograph stayed in his wallet. He never stopped smiling about it.
Least distinguished Derby winner? Maybe. Most distinguished trainer? Without question.
Getting to cover Zenyatta — his brilliant, electrifying mare who won 19 straight races, including 13 at the Grade 1 level — was a career highlight. I watched her Breeders' Cup Classic win in 2009 from the rail at Santa Anita, standing in a crowd and right beside, of all people, Bo Derek.
But what I remember just as much was the quiet satisfaction of a trainer who had believed in a mare enough to run her against the the best male horses in the world, having been proven completely, triumphantly right.
John Shirreffs was born on June 1, 1945, in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, raised between Long Island and a family farm in New Hampshire where horses were part of the landscape from the beginning.
He served in the Marine Corps and did a tour in Vietnam. When I once asked him how his military experience had helped him in his career, he calmly dismissed the comparison, clearly preferring not to go that route.
When he came back from Vietnam, he had no particular plan. He wanted to go to Hawaii, he once said — become a surfer, maybe. But California intervened. A friend knew somebody who knew somebody, and, before long, Shirreffs found himself working as a hot walker, learning the rhythms of a race track. He spent years working different places, tending horses, learning their moods.
He began training in the 1970s, earning his first win with a horse called Pee Wee Painter in 1976.  He would eventually send out 596 winners, earning more than $58 million in purses.
In 2000, he met Dottie Ingordo, then the racing manager for A&M Records co-founder Jerry Moss. Moss, cut from the same classy cloth as Shirreffs, was looking for a trainer. Shirreffs got the job. He and Dottie fell in love and were married three years later.
Through Moss, Shirreffs came to train both Giacomo and Zenyatta, two horses who could not have been more different in temperament, style and public profile, yet who demanded the same thing from their trainer: patience.
Giacomo was an unlikely champion. The Derby is the most storied race in American sports, and it doesn't typically reward the modestly talented. But Shirreffs believed in him with a stubbornness that made no sense to outsiders. Mike Smith rode Giacomo to that 50-1 victory and remembered Shirreffs to the Blood Horse as "an incredible horseman" who was "always trying to get into a horse's mind." That was his gift.
Zenyatta was the masterpiece. A daughter of Street Cry, Shirreffs didn't even send her to race until November of her 3-year-old year. Quirky, idiosyncratic and blessed with the breathtaking late kick. What she required was time, and Shirreffs was one of the rare trainers willing to wait.
She won the Breeders' Cup Distaff in 2008, then the Classic in 2009 — the first female ever to win that race — and was voted Horse of the Year in 2010, even though her final career start ended in a heartbreaking head defeat to Blame at Churchill Downs.
I remember Shirreffs after that race, standing alone on the track, silent, waiting for Zenyatta to be brought back around.
"I know no one else would have ever gotten the run out of Zenyatta like he did," Smith told BloodHorse said after Shirreffs' death, "because she needed all that time. It took him a while to figure her out, but once he did and started running her, man."
In the final year of his life, Shirreffs was still doing what he had always done. His colt Baeza finished third in both the 2025 Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes — behind Sovereignty and Journalism, a brilliant pair who left everyone else in their wake — and then won the Pennsylvania Derby that fall.
On Jan. 31, just two weeks before his death, Shirreffs sent out two horses at Santa Anita. Westwood won the San Pasqual Stakes. His last starter was a winner.
Of course it was.
He was not a man who sought the spotlight. Reporters who wanted a quote after a big win had to hustle to find him before he quietly followed his horse back to the barn. But if you caught him at the barn and earned a little of his time he would talk to you with a candor and thoughtfulness that was worth ten times the obligatory winner's circle interview.
"I think kindness is the big key to horses," he told BloodHorse earlier this winter, in what likely was among his last interviews. "I think it's good to talk to them. Horses are always trying to learn from their environment. If they can interact more with their environment, then they're going to have a more successful and happier experience."
Kindness. In a sport that can be hard and unsentimental, John Shirreffs made kindness his method and his legacy.
After Giacomo won the Derby, my Courier-Journal colleague Jennie Rees wrote in a column that one of the great blessings of his win was the wider public in Kentucky getting to know John Shirreffs.
We, and the horse racing world, were much better for it.
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