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Bob Baffert has had at least 75 racehorses — including two just last month — die under his care since 2000, according to the California Horse Racing Board and Daily Racing Form data, but a new book asserts that the legendary 72-year-old trainer has been unfairly maligned.
“[The] public pillorying [of him] for the past three years has felt more like a scapegoat for racing’s biggest problems than a solution,” writes Katie Bo Lillis in “Death of a Racehorse: An American Story” (Simon & Schuster, out Tuesday). Framing him as the sole villain for the rampant drug use in horse racing feels like “a deliberate confusing of the symptom with the disease.”
All eyes will be on Baffert this Saturday when he returns to the Kentucky Derby and Churchill Downs after a three-year suspension by Churchill Downs Inc. for using a banned substance on a winning horse.
He has two horses — Citizen Bull and Rodriquez — competing in the Derby, the latter of which the Washington Post picked as the “clear choice to win.”
The Arcadia, California-based Baffert trained the famed race’s 2021 winner, Medina Spirit. But afterwards, the colt tested positive for betamethasone, an anti-inflammatory drug that’s commonly used in the equestrian world but can’t be in a horse’s bloodstream on race day.
On December 6, 2021, Medina Spirit collapsed during a training run at Santa Anita in California, dying of a heart attack. Two months after his death, Baffert was officially stripped of his Derby victory.
Churchill Downs also suspended Baffert for two years, and he responded with a lawsuit, insisting that he’d done nothing wrong. A federal court in Kentucky dismissed the case in 2023, and Baffert’s suspension was extended for a third year because of his insistence on “peddl[ing] a false narrative,” according to Churchill Downs. It finally ended last summer, with Baffert taking full responsibility for Medina Spirit’s positive test.
Though rumors had circulated for decades that “the most dominant trainer in the country was giving his horses a little chemical help,” Lillis writes, it was a huge reckoning for the sport.
Baffert has had a record-tying six Kentucky Derby wins (not counting Medina) and twice clinched the Triple Crown — with American Pharoah in 2015 and Justify in 2018.
“Before Baffert, no one had won the Triple Crown since 1978,” writes Lillis.
Focusing solely on the tragic death of Medina Spirit is shortsighted, she asserts. “[It] wasn’t the first time one of Bob Baffert’s horses had dropped dead of a heart attack,” writes Lillis. “It wasn’t even the second, or the third. A decade before, seven horses in Baffert’s stable had died abruptly of suspected cardiac-related causes in less than two years — nine times the rate of other trainers stabled in the state of California.”
He is also hardly the only questionable trainer within the industry. In recent years, more than two dozen trainers and veterinarians have been indicted for “juicing” horses with performance-enhancing drugs, like “blood building drugs, which… can lead to cardiac issues or death,” according to the Department of Justice. One industry veteran told The Post that 60% of Thoroughbreds are drugged by trainers.
In 2020, just a year before the scandal that briefly cost Baffert his career, “the sport of Thoroughbred horse racing was in a moment of profound peril,” writes Lillis. Drug use was widespread, with horses receiving everything “from sedatives to joint injections to a deeply controversial drug designed to prevent spontaneous hemorrhaging of the lungs during intense exercise, sometimes in untested combinations with unknown outcomes.”
In 2024 alone, there were 161 race-related horse deaths, with 15 of them occurring on Kentucky tracks and six at Churchill Downs, according to the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority.
When he was finally exposed for Medina Spirit, Baffert pushed back. He gave media interviews and press conferences insisting that his horses — particularly Medina Spirit, despite the toxicology report—had never received betamethasone. “He was widely mocked for rambling, speculative explanations that at times bordered on the absurd,” writes Lillis.
He made a brief comeback in 2023, winning the Preakness Stakes for a record-setting eighth time with a horse named National Treasure. But the victory was overshadowed by the death of another one of his horses, Havnameltdown, who’d been injected with betamethasone.
“It was an unsettling reminder that Baffert, like so many trainers who had run afoul of racing’s petty regulations before, had simply gone back to business as usual,” writes Lillis.
According to her, at the Preakness, Baffert had an encounter with Shaun Richards, the new director for the Horseracing Integrity and Welfare Unit, the anti-doping authority.
Baffert told the author that Richards warned him, “I’m gonna be watching you guys, and you better not mess up because I know how to find you.” (According to Richards, Baffert’s version of events “was fabricated, other than I said ‘hello.’”)
Lillis is hopeful that the drug scandals of horse-racing, personified by Baffert, may be behind them.
“Some horsemen have quietly told me that they have seen attitudes toward the animal begin to shift,” she writes. “Whether that change will happen fast enough to catch up to the outside world’s expectations remains to be seen.”
English (US)