Sisterson has Oxy Lady ready to go in Rachel Alexandra

Jack Sisterson took his first job as a head trainer late last spring when Brad Kelley’s Calumet Farm hired him to run horses out of a barn at the farm, just down the road from Keeneland. This past fall, Sisterson took nine stalls for the Fair Grounds meet for two purposes: to run some turf horses in New Orleans, and to campaign Calumet’s filly Oxy Lady early in her 3-year-old season.

The turf stock already has succeeded: Sisterson has started four horses at Fair Grounds, all on grass, since the calendar flipped to 2019, and come away with two wins and a second. On Feb. 16 it’s Oxy Lady’s turn when she returns to action in the Rachel Alexandra Stakes.

“The horses seem to be coming to form down there,” Sisterson said. “The weather at Keeneland isn’t the greatest this time of year.”

Sisterson, a 34-year-old native of England, got substantially more publicity than the typical assistant trainer when he helped oversee the day-to-day care of I’ll Have Another as the colt won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes in 2012. Sisterson was working for a Thoroughbred sales company when he tired of life away from direct equine contact and took the job for Calumet. His runners went 53-4-5-11 during 2018, but have been on point the last several weeks at Fair Grounds.

On Feb. 2, High Mounte, who began his career for Calumet trained by Joseph O’Brien in Ireland, won a turf maiden race. In Friday’s fourth race, Sisterson and Calumet start Stella d’Oro, another former O’Brien trainee from Ireland who has been working in company with High Mounte.

But it’s Oxy Lady, a dirt horse, who’s the stable star. Oxy Lady became Sisterson’s first winner when she captured a Belterra Park maiden race last September. She went on to finish third in a Keeneland allowance race before shipping to New York and winning the Grade 3 Tempted Stakes by five lengths. At the suggestion of jockey Adam Beschizza, who is slated to ride Oxy Lady in the Rachel Alexandra, Sisterson raced the filly in blinkers for the first time in the Tempted.

From the Nov. 2 Tempted at Aqueduct it was on to the Grade 1 Starlet on Dec. 8 at Los Alamitos Racecourse, where Oxy Lady finished a close fourth

“She shipped to five different tracks, and at the end of the day that can take a toll on them,” Sisterson said. “She’s come back bigger and stronger, and she seems to be liking the dirt at Fair Grounds. We gave her two sort of easy pieces of half-mile works to get her going, took the blinkers off her for those, and let her enjoy doing her own thing. Then we stepped her up to five-eighths, put her in company with the blinkers back on. Coming off a little layoff we wanted to engage her a little bit. She made her workmate, who actually isn’t a slow horse, look like a slow horse.”

Indeed, on Jan. 26 Oxy Lady worked five furlongs in 1:00.20, fastest of 53 breezes at the distance, and on Feb. 2 she went in 59, fastest of 73 such works.

Oxy Lady gave Sisterson his first stakes win in the Tempted. Perhaps she’ll also provide his second in the Rachel Alexandra.