The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Baffert in spotlight for wrong reasons
Even though Bob Baffert isn’t at Pimlico Race Course this week, his shadow hangs over the Preakness, the Triple Crown and horse racing.
This should have been another celebration of Baffert, the face of the sport with two Triple Crown triumphs on his resume, coming off an upset win at the Kentucky Derby and looking for a record eighth Preakness victory. Instead, Derby winner Medina Spirit failing a postrace drug test for the steroid betamethasone has put Baffert and the sport in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.
“The whole atmosphere here has changed,” rival trainer and friend D. Wayne Lukas said May 12. “The enthusiasm, the feel of excitement is not here. That’s what’s bad for the industry right there.”
Lukas tried to talk Baffert into traveling to Baltimore
for the Preakness to saddle Medina Spirit and Concert Tour. Instead, Baffert’s horses are under the watchful eye of assistant trainer Jimmy Barnes and Maryland Racing Commission officials who set conditions for additional testing and monitoring for them to be allowed to run May 15.
If three rounds of testing come back clean, Medina Spirit will likely be favored
in the Preakness and, if successful, would be twothirds of the way to Baffert’s third Triple Crown in six years — albeit with a giant asterisk.
“It certainly has altered the dynamic of the Preakness considerably,” NBC Sports analyst Randy Moss said. “It’s gone from a warm and fuzzy, feel-good story about a tenacious $1,000 yearling who somehow defied the odds to win the Kentucky Derby into the depths of where no one in horse racing likes to see it go.”
Rather than Baffert holding court outside the stakes barn at Pimlico in his trademark sunglasses and chatting with Lukas, it was Barnes tersely ending a short interview session after “no comment” replies when asked about his boss’s mindset and whether Medina Spirit was still being treated for a skin condition, which caused the horse to be given an antifungal ointment that Baffert said Tuesday was a possible source of the steroid.
Plenty of others, however, want to talk about the medication violation, Baffert’s fifth in a little over a year.
Activist Marty Irby of Animal Wellness Action said, “Baffert should be extraordinarily alert to all substances that go into horses under his control” and recommended a zerotolerance policy for drugging violations.