Baffert loses benefit of the doubt
There is one household name in horse racing, a man so well-known that TMZ has stopped him at restaurants and ESPN has invited him to be a celebrity picker on “College GameDay.”
Bob Baffert is the only person involved in the sport at any level who is likely to be stopped for an autograph or picture away from a racetrack, the product of his ubiquitous presence on television during the Triple Crown and his unmistakeable flop of white hair on top of a head whose eyes are constantly covered by sunglasses.
And now, that may well be the image of horse racing’s greatest shame.
For now, Baffert is still a seven-time Kentucky Derby winner trainer – with a big asterisk next to his latest triumph and a cloud so ominous over his powerhouse barn that it will be difficult to view his success the same way again.
Baffert acknowledged Sunday that Medina Spirit, the 12-1 shot who went wire-to-wire in last Saturday’s Derby, returned a positive post-race test over the allowed limit for betamethasone, a common anti-inflammatory drug.
If the test is confirmed, Churchill Downs officials said Sunday Medina Spirit will be stripped of the win – something that hasn’t happened since ’68 when Dancer’s Image was disqualified 3days after the race after phenylbutazone was detected in his system.
Baffert insisted Sunday that he had never treated Medina Spirit with betamethasone, and even suggested there might be some kind of sabotage at play.
At a minimum, this is now a mess that will likely take years to litigate and bring even more suspicion onto the most successful and controversial trainer in horse racing. At worst, a Derby winner being disqualified for a drug test – and particularly one from the Baffert barn – will be the ultimate told-you-so moment for the sport’s many detractors, who have long insisted that many of its most successful participants are chemists as much as they are horsemen.
Either way, this is a complete disaster for racing – but one that has felt inevitable for some time now given how ineffectively the sport is governed and the pervasive sense among bettors and fans that layers of bureaucracy and conflicts of interest have enabled cheaters to slither through the cracks.
Among those who have long been alleged to do the most slithering is Baffert, a trainer whose win rate in the most high-profile races has been remarkable to the point of suspicion.
And in the last couple of years, his critics have had plenty of ammunition in a spate of positive drug tests – all of which Baffert has been able to muddy up enough to avoid becoming a pariah.
When it was revealed a year later that Triple Crown winner Justify had tested positive for a tiny but illegal amount of scopolamine after winning the Santa Anita Derby, it was blamed on jimson weed contaminating his feed.
Two positives last year on Arkansas Derby Day with horses were blamed on a barn staffer’s lidocaine patch that he’d been wearing for a bad back.
When Gamine was disqualified from a third-place finish in last year’s Kentucky Oaks due to betamethasone – the same drug as Medina Spirit – Baffert said he had given it to her 18 days before the race, which is supposed to be enough time to clear the horse’s system.
Another Baffert horse last summer at Del Mar tested positive for dextrorphan, which was blamed on cough syrup being taken by a staffer.
At this point, there is no reason to give Baffert the benefit of the doubt when he says he’s never given betamethasone to Medina Spirit. Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t.
But what is true is that Baffert would have to be insanely reckless – brazen to the point of absurdity – to have actually done it.