Catching Up With Life Is Sweet

Garrett Gomez celebrates after winning the 2009 Breeders' Cup Ladies' Classic on Life Is Sweet. (Photos by Eclipse Sportswire) 
As a full-sister to 2004 champion 2-year-old filly and Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies winner Sweet Catomine, Life Is Sweet was full of promise and carried high expectations.
She broke through for her first win in her second start, winning by nine lengths on the turf at Belmont for owners-breeders Marty and Pam Wygod. Life Is Sweet spent the next year playing around at the stakes level, earning two seconds and a fourth in four stakes attempts for trainer Bill Mott.
But it wasn’t until she was moved to California to spend time in trainer John Shirreffs’ stable that Life Is Sweet stepped up her game as the trainer learned more about what made her tick.
“Each horse as you get to know them, you discover more about them,” Shirreffs said. “You always had to wait for her. She was never in a hurry to do anything, you just had to be patient and wait for her to want to do it.”
LIFE IS SWEET SCHOOLING IN THE PADDOCK

After a six-month break from the races, Life Is Sweet debuted for Shirreffs in the Grade 2 El Encino Stakes, making her second start on a synthetic surface. Bettering her fourth-place finish the previous year on Keeneland’s synthetic surface in the Ashland Stakes, Life Is Sweet won the El Encino by 2 ½ lengths for her first graded stakes victory.
The filly took California by storm that spring, winning the La Canada Stakes by three-quarters of a length before scoring her first Grade 1 victory in the 2009 Santa Margarita Invitational Handicap by 2 ½ lengths. But in her fourth start of the year, Life Is Sweet ran into the top older female running in America when she had to face Zenyatta, a fellow Shirreffs’ trainee. Shirreffs had a good experience in that race, with his girls taking first and second. Life Is Sweet held her own against Zenyatta but in the end finished behind her by 1 ¾ lengths.
“I felt that I was really blessed to have some really nice fillies at that time,” Shirreffs recently said. “It was a joy to come to the barn every morning.”
After her loss to Zenyatta, Life Is Sweet was given the chance to take on males in the Hollywood Gold Cup that July. The bettors seemed to approve of the move, making Life Is Sweet the 3.40-to-1 second choice, one of only two horses under 5-to-1 odds in the race.
Life Is Sweet dropped back to second to last, more than 10 lengths off the leader for most of the running. Near the eighth pole, she was still in the back of the field but put on a massive burst of speed to finish in third at the finish line. While the placing was still 7 ¾ lengths behind winner Rail Trip, it showed that she could compete with top racehorses in California no matter the sex.
Two subsequent fourth-place finishes led Life Is Sweet to the Breeders’ Cup Ladies’ Classic, a race that her trainer had won the previous year with Zenyatta.
Life Is Sweet dropped to the back of the field as Careless Jewel took off and led by open lengths during the middle of the race. At the second call, Life Is Sweet was more than 17 lengths behind Careless Jewel and three behind the second-to-last horse. But as the field turned into the stretch, Life Is Sweet made her move and swept past the entire field to take command. At the finish line, she was 2 ½ lengths ahead and trainer John Shirreffs became one of only four trainers to win back-to-back Breeders’ Cup Ladies’ Classics. The following day, Shirreffs added to his outstanding weekend by winning the Breeders’ Cup Classic with Zenyatta.
“What a weekend we had with [Life Is Sweet] winning the Distaff on Friday. She was very determined as a racehorse, she loved to catch horses,” Shirreffs said.
2009 BREEDERS’ CUP LADIES CLASSIC

In 2010, Life Is Sweet ran in the Santa Maria Handicap as a preparation for a trip to the Dubai World Cup. After finishing second in the race, it looked like a trip across the world was next on her agenda but that ended when she came back from a March 13 workout with muscle cramps. As it wasn’t the first time she’d had the problem, Shirreffs and the Wygods decided to retire her.
“I thought she was really one of the neatest horses I’d ever been around. She was pretty, she was all racehorse, she was fun to work with,” the trainer said. “Her name suited her very well. She is very independent. She was really nice and had a great personality.”
Life Is Sweet retired with a record of six wins, four seconds, and one third in 16 starts with $1,820,810 in earnings. During her career, she hit the board in eight graded stakes races with wins in four of them.
Life Is Sweet produced her first foal in 2011, a colt by Smart Strike. She also has a 2-year-old filly named Sweet Promises, by Bernardini, who has yet to register any official workouts. Both her yearling and weanling have more in common than being by Tapit as they were both born exactly a year apart on April 19. Life Is Sweet is again in foal to Tapit for a 2015 foal.
Boarded at Lane’s End, Life Is Sweet was reunited with an old stablemate at the end of 2010 when Zenyatta also retired to the farm. The pair have spent time sharing a pasture at one of the farm’s broodmare divisions and foaled within an hour of each other in 2014.