Jenni paused her cancer treatment to get married, now a racehorse carries her name

In a richly lived life, Tony Ottobre has only one lasting regret. In 2015, daughter Jenni was fighting brain cancer, but with a doctor’s blessing paused a promising new treatment to get married to long-time boyfriend Luke. Before the honeymoon was over, her tumour had regrown to the size of a lemon and she was in a wheelchair. Five months later, she died, aged 30.

“I’m very pragmatic. There’s a problem, fix it. Don’t wait, do it now,” said Ottobre. “I let myself down by allowing that to happen. I should have grabbed them by the scruff of the neck and said, you’re going in, that’s it. It’s been the biggest regret of my life. You always fix a problem. You don’t wait until tomorrow. Fix it today.”

Cox Plate hope Pride Of Jenni is named after owner Tony Ottobre’s daughter.Credit: Wayne Taylor

Jenni had lived with the cancer for more than four years. Ottobre marvels still at her attitude. “She never once said to me, ‘why me, dad?’” he said, his eyes reddening slightly. “She was entitled to, but she never did. She was a very brave girl right to the end.”

Soon after she was diagnosed in 2011, Ottobre bought his daughter a racehorse and named it JenniO. It won some races and brought a measure of joy to Ottobre, his wife Lynn and son Michael as well as Jenni. It was the first of a succession of at least 30 horses carrying variations of Jenni’s name - Ottobre admits he is running out of variations - that founded Ottobre’s racing operation almost by accident.

In a stakes race on Melbourne Cup day a year after Jenni died, one called Jennifer Lynn came from last at the top of the straight to win in the last stride. Ottobre had the bug.

“We got bigger and bigger, and added more horses, and the more fun we had with the horses, the more comfort they gave us and the more we purchased,” he said. He now has 70 at his Cape Schanck spread.

Tony Ottobre with “the real Jenni”, his late daughter.

The best of the Jennis by far is Pride Of Jenni. That will be her in Jenni’s favourite sky blue and purple silks (Ottobre replaced his previous Richmond colours with these) in barrier 7 at Moonee Valley in the Cox Plate on Saturday, and very likely her leading them all into the Valley’s short straight. That’s the way she likes to race, leading out like a Kenyan middle distance runner and daring anyone to catch her. Ottobre calls her a once-in-a-lifetime horse. Apart from the balm to his broken heart, she’s won him $10 million in prizemoney.

Ottobre, one of five sons of post-war immigrants from Italy, grew up in Reservoir. “Thomastown was still all paddocks,” he said. “There was a riding school there where you could pay a couple of dollars and jump on a horse and go for a bit of a yahoo.” Ottobre became an adrenaline junkie.

He spent four years at Assumption college, Kilmore, and said boarding school taught him the importance of a team ethic. His next life lesson was as an apprentice jockey. “One of the first things I had to learn was how to fall off a horse,” he said. It stood him in good stead recently when he abruptly parted company with a motorbike.

Trainer Pat Burke told Ottobre he was too heavy boned to make it as a jockey, and so it proved. The stewards also had reservations. One day, “they told me to go back out in the country and learn how to ride,” he said. “Which was fair enough.” But it was all experience.

Pride Of Jenni wins the Queen Elizabeth Stakes in the autumn in Sydney.Credit: Getty

Next was a stint as a strapper and horse-breaker for Colin Hayes at his Lindsay Park stud in South Australia, and more salutary lessons. One day, Hayes asked him to rake a gravel yard. Inspecting his work, Hayes said: “Yes, it’s clean, but is that the best you can do?” Hayes took the rake and began to map out a herringbone pattern.

“The lesson was, you can do the job - but is that the best job you can do?” said Ottobre. “I never forgot that. It helped me later in business later in life.”

The ground was laid. Back in Melbourne, Ottobre worked in retail and briefly as an assistant station master and signalman at Greensborough before launching his own automotive parts business in 1989.

In all he does, Ottobre applies himself. When Jenni took up netball, and no-one else stepped forward to coach, he did. “I didn’t even know how many players are on the field,” he said. He taught himself from library books. In their second season, his team made the grand final and Jenni won the comp best and fairest. “I’m still proud to this day,” he said.

By the time Ottobre decided to specialise in LED lighting for vehicles, the internet had replaced library books. For Ottobre, it was a boon. You could trust the internet then, he said. Ottobre’s studies led him to a principle. “I learned that quality is the most important, price not so much,” he said. He built up a business that eventually employed 40 people here and in Europe.

But he kept long and punishing hours himself, and in 2019 decided to sell up and concentrate on his horses. He said he lavished the proceeds of the sale on his brothers and brothers-in-law. “It makes me happier giving money away than making money,” he said. “I didn’t realise it would be so.”

Tony Ottobre and Pride Of Jenni.Credit: Wayne Taylor

When Jenni was born, Ottobre thought he was speaking under his breath when he muttered: “What am I going to do with a girl?” When he looked up, the nurses were looking daggers at him. Hastily, he explained that he had only brothers, went to an all-boys school and his first-born was a boy. He felt unqualified.

Jenni excelled at all she tried. At school, she matched high jumpers much taller than her and later represented the state at javelin. For a time, she held the state under-11 400 metres record. “Four hundred metres is like a marathon at that age,” Ottobre said. “Because of her inner strength, she did what she did, which is very similar to Pride Of Jenni runs like: gets out in front and keeps going.”

In adulthood, she worked in the family business and travelled widely. The cancer diagnosis came as a shock, of course. “We cried for a couple of days, and then we said, OK, we’ll dust ourselves off and tackle this,” Ottobre said. “They’re not going to take my daughter away without a fight.”

He did plenty of research. He’s careful to say he was lucky to have the means to turn over every stone. He, Lynn, Jennifer and Luke travelled far and wide. “We tried a few things,” he said. “We even tried bird flu, because bird flu was having a reaction to cancer at the time. The last one was the herpes virus [treatment].”

Momentarily, hope flared. Ottobre urged his daughter to delay the wedding, understood why she did not, but still chides himself for not being firmer in his insistence. He also wishes the protocols guiding her experimental treatment were freer so that it could have been pursued more aggressively.

He’s sure of one thing, that the long-term answer is immunotherapy. “That’s the only way we can cure cancer, as far as I can see,” he said. “Your body has to kill it.”

Jenni outran her original prognosis by more than three years. She died in 2015, a week after Cup day. The family had a beach house and a boat at Mt Martha and Jenni had loved both. Devastated, they repaired there to mourn. “We tried for nearly a year, but it was no longer a happy place,” Ottobre said. “It’s a beautiful place, but it wasn’t good for our soul.”

Horses had kept them going through Jenni’s illness, so they decided to sell up and buy 20 hectares at Cape Schanck that is now their stud. Ottobre styles it as a health resort for horses. “Now we’re trying to incorporate a little boot camp because horses do get bored and start to fight amongst each other in the herd,” he said.

True to his nature, he’s boned up on every aspect of buying, breeding and equine care. His hands-on approach extends to sometimes testy dealings with a string of trainers and means he regularly stands on the feet of others in the industry, including stewards. He makes no apology, saying it is all for the horse.

The son of a migrant tailor from Reservoir is still pinching himself. At the Cox Plate barrier draw, he looked around at the names of the horses, the legendary trainers and the multinational owners, all of racing’s glitterati, and blinked. “They’re buying horses for $4, 5, 6 million dollars. Ours cost only $100,000,” he said.

“To be in that level of racing is just incredible. The real Jenni put us there, as far as I’m concerned. One hundred per cent.”