EVERYBODY WAS CAUGHT COMPLETELY OFF-GUARD.

about?” Fuller responded. “It’s very serious.” Dancer’s Image had tested positive for a drug called phenylbutazone. At the time, the drug was legal to use in training but couldn’t be in a horse’s system on race day. Churchill Downs officials had no idea what to do.

“There’d never been a horse disqualified for a drug positive before then and never since. So nobody knew quite how to deal with that,” said Toby, a Kentucky author and lawyer.

They held a staff meeting to sort through their options. Kelso Sturgeon, the track’s public relations director at the time, once recalled to the Los Angeles Times that several officials argued against making public news of the positive drug test.

“They wanted to sweep it under the rug,” he said. “I started to tell (Wathen Knebelkamp, the president of Churchill Downs) that we couldn’t do that, that too

Fifty years ago, only the race’s winner and one random horse had to submit to a urine test. Trace amounts of phenylbutazone, commonly known as bute around the track, were found in Dancer’s Image’s sample. Bute is an anti-inflammatory used to alleviate pain, not a performance-enhancing drug.

“Bute’s not a stimulant or a depressant,” said Reed, the veteran turf writer. “It was more like an aspirin that humans take. To this day, probably over 90 per cent of the race horses in the country use bute, sometimes only as a precaution.”

At the time, the drug was legal at many tracks, but permitted only during training at Churchill Downs. Alex Harthill, the well-known equine veterinarian, gave Dancer’s Image a dose six days before the race to help his ankles, which should have cleared within 72 hours. Dancer’s Image, everyone thought, had nothing