Death of racehorse sullies an industry that’s already tainted

Medina Spirit, the maybe (or maybe not) winner of the Kentucky Derby, dropped dead Monday.

The Florida-bred thoroughbred collapsed after a routine workout at Santa Anita Park in California — a three-year-old dead from an apparent heart attack.

Don’t overreact, racing honchos tell us. Unexpected deaths aren’t uncommon in horseracing. If this had been a less celebrated colt, no one would notice.

Indeed, the website Horseracing Wrongs listed by name nearly a thousand racehorses who died at U.S. racetracks in 2020. Medina Spirit’s was the 71st racehorse death in California so far this year.

Florida racing has suffered its own disconcerting death toll. In February, the Sun Sentinel’s Susannah Bryan reported that at Gulfstream Park alone, 113 horses died in 2019 and 2020.

But the same public that voted to outlaw dog racing in Florida in 2018 now ponders the moral distinction with horseracing, tainted by so many fatalities and the 2020 arrests of 27 trainers, pharmaceutical compounders, drug peddlers and veterinarians for “a widespread scheme of covertly obtaining and administering adulterated and misbranded” performance enhancing drugs (PEDs), according to an indictment. Many of the transgressors, including the infamous trainer dubbed “Juice Man,” were from South Florida.

Medina Spirit, a 12-to-1 longshot, was the apparent winner of the 2021 Kentucky Derby, until the post-race drug test turned up a prohibited painkiller. The Kentucky Racing Commission still hasn’t decided who deserves the $1.8 million purse.

That was the 30th time a horse under the care of legendary trainer Bob Baffort — a seven-time Derby winner — had been flagged for banned substances. In June, the Washington Post counted at least 74 fatalities among his racehorses in California alone. Medina Spirit makes 75.

Of course, the death of the Ocala-born colt might have been an innocent tragedy, unrelated to PEDs. But Medina Spirit’s death comes at an unseemly time for an industry worried about its tawdry image. On Friday, Jorge Navarro, 46, of Cooper City, the trainer known around the tracks as “Juice Man,” is due in federal court in Manhattan for sentencing.

Juice Man pleaded guilty in August to doping his animals with an astounding array of illicit concoctions. Navarro’s racehorses had won $38.4 million before his arrest, “all the while risking the health” of his charges, U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil noted. His horses were the biggest money winners at Hallandale’s Gulfstream Park during the 201819 the racing season.

Now we know those winnings were attributable to dangerous, hard-to-detect compounds with names like “red acid,” that jacked up his horses’ performances or masked their pain if they were running injured.

A 2019 FBI wiretap recorded a co-conspirator describing Navarro’s callous disregard for his horses’ welfare. “You know how many f— king horses [Navarro] f—king killed and broke down that I made disappear? You know how much trouble he could get in, if they found the six horses we killed?”

In court Friday, Juice Man faces a possible five-year prison term, a $26 million restitution order and eventual deportation back to his native Panama. “As he admitted, Navarro, the purported ‘winner’ of major horse races around the world, was in fact a reckless fraudster whose veneer of success relied on the systematic abuse of the animals under his control,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss told Judge Vyskocil.

Three days after the Navarro sentencing, prosecutors will be back before Vyskocil asking for the revocation of bail for Seth Fishman, the Highland Beach veterinarian charged with providing “adulterated and misbranded” PEDs to the cabal of cheats.

On Dec. 3, FBI agents, acting on an employee’s tip, returned to the Palm Beach County offices where they say Fishman — despite his pending charges — was still cranking out “injectable, misbranded and adulterated performance-enhancing drugs.”

In a wiretapped conversation last year, Fishman nicely described the tactics that have tainted American horseracing. “If you’re giving something to a horse to make it [run] better, and you’re not supposed to do that … that’s doping,” the veterinarian explained to a prospective customer. “You know, whether or not it’s testable, that’s a different story.”

Race officials failed to detect the “red acid” injected into Navarro’s biggest winner, X Y Jet, after the horse won the $1.5 million Dubai Golden Shaheen race in 2019. “I gave it to him through 50 injections,” Navarro explained to a co-conspirator as the FBI listened. “I gave it to him through the nose.”

Ten months after the Dubai triumph, X Y Jet collapsed, leaving the horseracing industry to explain away another premature death of a fabulous thoroughbred. And another mysterious heart attack.