"My opinion is, the horse makes us. We don't make the horse."
As part of a feature in the January 2021 edition of this magazine, Rodney Jenkins said that. When somebody gets around to creating an award in the name of Jenkins, the sentence ought to be on the plaque. Jenkins, who died Dec. 5 at age 80, put together two careers with horses. First, he was a world-class show rider -- winning major events the world over. Next, he trained racehorses -- winning graded stakes, piling up 941 victories and producing $24.84 million in purse earnings while based mainly at Laurel Park in Maryland.
A Virginia native, Jenkins grew up in perhaps the perfect situation to cultivate such careers. His father, Enis, was a huntsman with the Rapidan Hunt and taught his sons -- Rodney, Dale and Larry -- to ride at Hill Top Farm near Orange, Va. They foxhunted, jumped, went cross-country, trained horses of all shapes, sizes and descriptions. Rodney gravitated toward the show ring. He built courses on the farm, taught horses the necessary skills, watched other riders, learned and developed. By 1961, when he graduated high school, he was off. He won his first major international competition at the Washington International Horse Show in 1970. He would add three more Washington triumphs, win at Madison Square Garden, the Devon Horse Show and anywhere else he swung a leg over a horse.
With Jenkins, Thoroughbred Idle Dice won 31 grand prix titles and became the first horse inducted into the Show Jumping Hall of Fame. He won grand prix classes, speed classes and the high-jumping puissance classes (once clearing a 7-foot, 2¾-inch fence). As a professional in a time when international competitions were restricted to amateurs, Jenkins never rode in the Olympics. When the rules changed, he earned individual and team silver medals at the 1987 Pan American Games as a 43-year-old.
Jenkins retired from the show ring in 1989, and ventured into racing. He pinhooked for a while, then turned to training steeplechasers. Illinois-bred Explosive Darling provided the first win, a $10,000 maiden hurdle at the Tanglewood meet in North Carolina in 1991. By 1998, the stable began to diversify to flat horses. He won 14 races that year, 24 the next and topped $1 million in purses for the first of 10 consecutive years in 2002. Cordmaker topped $1 million in earnings and won 14 races, 11 of them stakes including the General George-G3 in 2022.
Twice he finished third in the Pimlico Special-G3. Phlash Phelps won the Maryland Million Turf twice. Shimmering Aspen won five stakes and earned $415,660. Bandbox won his first three starts in 2010 and won the General George in 2014 in his second start off a 17-month layoff. All four were purchased as yearlings at Fasig-Tipton Midlantic by Jenkins for Ellen Charles' Hillwood Stable.
Jenkins' last starter, 3-year-old gelding The Band Runs On, finished fourth in Laurel's Star de Naskra June 29. His last winner came with 3-year-old filly Lilly Lightning April 19 at Laurel. Both horses were bred in Maryland and owned by Hillwood.
"We had a wonderful time together," Charles said via a Maryland Jockey Club press release. "I learned a lot from Rodney. Even though I had grown up around horses, I hadn't grown up as far as breeding them and going to sales and things like that. He was a really fun person to be with. It was great, great experience."
Jenkins' other graded-stakes win came with On The Run Farm's Running Tide in the 2002 Leonard Richards-G3 at Delaware Park. Other top horses he trained were Willa On the Move, winner of Laurel's 2002 Politely and second that year in the Acorn-G1 and Miss Preakness-G2; and multiple stakes winners Outstander and Mt. Carson.
Trainer Hamilton Smith, 79, knew Jenkins for decades from their time on the Laurel backstretch. Over a five-year span between 2014 and 2018, Smith and Jenkins won the Maryland Million Turf twice each -- Smith with Talk Show Man (2014, 2018) and Jenkins with Phlash Phelps (2015-16).
"He'd beat me and then I'd beat him and it went back and forth. It was always Phlash Phleps and Talk Show Man. It was a pretty good rivalry there," Smith said in the MJC release. "Rodney was top shelf, no doubt about that. I don't see where anybody could fault him for what he did as a competitor in the show ring that carried right over to training horses. He was just a first-class guy."
Jenkins downplayed the difficulty in transition from the show ring to the racetrack.
"I think all horses have been a learning curve," he said in that 2021 article. "You train the horse and let the horse train you how he wants to be trained -- whether it was a jumper or a racehorse. There's no difference. The ones that want to do it show it to you real quick."
