The Top Favorites, And The (Very) Long Shadow Of Bob Baffert Among Them

With the 2022 Kentucky Derby quick approaching on Might 7 at Churchill Downs, Epicenter and Zandon nonetheless appear to be twinned on the high of the category, with White Abarrio, Cyberknife and the lightly-raced Santa Anita Derby winner Taiba not far behind. Taiba is fascinating for 2 causes, foremost, not many horses with simply two races underneath their belt even handle to make it right into a Kentucky Derby area. However Taiba is arguably extra fascinating as a result of, till April 4, he was being skilled by the nationally banned six-time Kentucky Derby winner Bob Baffert, who, dropping his courtroom attraction of his 90-day Kentucky Horse Racing Fee ban on April 1, handed Taiba to his former assistant Tim Yakteen in order that the horse may enter the Derby. The lengthy and in need of it’s, regardless of the coach’s nationwide ban, a Baffert horse will run within the 2022 Derby. On race day, Yakteen can have had the horse in his barn for exactly one month and three days. Any manner you chop it, it’s a Baffert horse, and a really speedy “workaround” of the ban.

Simply two trainers within the Derby’s 148-year historical past have received the race six instances; Baffert is considered one of them. Famously, he’s received the Preakness seven instances and the Triple Crown twice. Slick, sociable, by no means at a loss for a quip, and retaining an innate cowboy swagger deep within the DNA inherited from his Nogales, Arizona, cattle-rancher father, Baffert has reduce a successful, good-looking determine at racetracks throughout the nation for many years now. And, till a number of hours after the 2021 Kentucky Derby, because the race-day blood take a look at outcomes on Baffert’s winner Medina Spirit filtered in, the coach was a most welcome determine wherever he raced.

However per week out from the 2022 Derby at Churchill Downs, one may argue that Baffert has solid an extended patchwork shadow in his sport even with out the ugly and — for the athlete himself, who collapsed and died in coaching at Baffert’s dwelling observe of Santa Anita — finally tragic Medina Spirit disqualification saga of 2021.

Baffert’s involuntary breather from his ordinarily busy Triple Crown season this yr provides us a little bit of a possibility to replicate on the Baffert efffect, specifically, the roller-coaster trip that the occasions surrounding Medina Spirit’s disgraced 2021 Derby marketing campaign have introduced the game. First, it’s attainable to argue, as Baffert’s attorneys persistently do, that the topical ointment containing betamethasone that was reportedly the supply of the picograms of the substance present in Medina Spirit’s race-day samples was being administered (once more, topically) to the horse to deal with a pores and skin lesion/rash. Thus, so the Baffert argument goes, the drug’s presence within the animal violated the letter however not the spirit of the Kentucky race-day ban, which facilities on betamethasone being extra invasively injected for (unlawful) orthopedic aid.

Thoughts you, betamethasone is a authorized equine treatment for orthopedic aid in Kentucky and elsewhere. It’s simply banned in Kentucky on race days. However what that additionally means is that the trainers and their vets shall be extremely educated concerning the means of the equine physique to metabolize and excrete the substance to the purpose at which there is no such thing as a betamethasone current.

Churchill’s and the Kentucky Horse Racing Fee’s place is that it could have been extraordinarily tough for Baffert or anyone in his Churchill barn — having raced in Kentucky as a lot as they’ve — to not know that Kentucky bans using betamethasone on race days and, crucially, additionally to not know that the ointment contained betamethasone of a kind (betamethasone valerate) that isn’t, strictly talking, unlawful. It’s the presence of betamethasone acetate administered by way of injection that’s outlawed in Kentucky on race day. This results of Medina Spirit’s 2021 break up pattern, returned from a New York lab in December 2021, appears to not have performed a task within the considering of Churchill executives, nor to the Kentucky Horse Racing Fee, in banning Bob Baffert. Additional, since betamethasone enjoys such broad use throughout the sport — as an example, its presence is wholly authorized in California on race days — and since coaching champion race horses is Baffert’s acknowledged career, it’s tough to think about that Baffert, his attending vets and/or his many assistants wouldn’t have had a really exact thought of the rate with which any sort of betamethasone is or might be metabolized by any Thoroughbred of their cost.

There’s a 14-day “withdrawal,” or metabolization, window for betamethasone. The Kentucky Horse Racing Fee’s and subsequently, on April 1, the appeals courtroom’s place was that there have been precisely zero novice horsemen or horsewomen current in 2021 within the Baffert barn at Churchill; that everyone from the legend himself on all the way down to the grooms would have recognized the drug’s profile. That information and actions primarily based in accordance with it could have been a part of the essential work of being a coach.

Nonetheless: Sentenced to a 90-day ban from racing in February for Medina Spirit’s repeated optimistic checks by the Kentucky Horse Racing Fee atop Churchill Downs’ earlier and barely extra direct ban stopping him from getting into any horse in any race on the observe via 2023, Mr. Baffert has been combating a rear-guard retreat from his not not like Napoleon’s infamously bloody retreat from Moscow in December 1812. Which is to say, Baffert’s and his enterprise’s troubles solely seem to develop as different, prior bans and alleged violations the coach has suffered over an extended profession — and the sometimes outlandish excuses that he’s made for them — have been picked up and carefully re-examined. Partly, it’s additionally true that this present, most severe ban is the results of the business’s deep consciousness of Mr. Baffert’s previous scrapes and bans. The truth is, a few of the previous tales Baffert has advised on himself in his outrageous, swashbuckling as-told-to autobiography, the now looking back aptly-titled Grime Highway To The Derby, revealed in 1999.

Not included in that e book, and enjoying a extra essential position within the minds of the authorities who instituted the present ban, three latest drug-regulation imbroglios from 2020 stand out: Baffert claimed {that a} horse who registered an unacceptable dose of dextromethorphan, a cough drugs, was someway the results of a groom who, working across the horse, was taking the drugs to alleviate his personal Covid-19 signs and had urinated within the horse’s stall; he claimed that his eventual 2020 Triple Crown winner Justify’s registered contamination with scopolamine was a results of his having unintentionally consuming jimson weed together with different horses in different barns; and at last, he claimed {that a} mare in his cost confirmed contaminated with lidocaine was, once more, unintentionally contaminated by a groom sporting a patch containing the drug for a sore again.

Left unclear in these narratives is how the human-to-horse transfers truly labored. Did that horse actually cross up his feed bucket and eat the urine-soaked hay off the stall flooring? And the way did that different horse get to licking the again patch on that groom once more? Bluntly put, in Bob Baffert’s barns, the acknowledged excuses hew to the Agatha Christie homicide mannequin: the butler did it. His grooms appear to get solid suspiciously usually because the villains.

In racing, these and different incidents have been greeted with open derision. Baffert is, or was, directly this era’s star horseman and a spokesman for the game, his horses have been famously prepared for his or her races whether or not the touts believed in them or not, and that, in recent times, has made his entry into any race an computerized boon for 1000’s of racegoers and observe stewards alike. Baffert was “good” for the game. Whether or not the it was the rock-steady American Pharoah or the overwhelming man-o-war Justify — to call his two Triple Crown winners — his athletes have been thrilling. It additionally added to his nationwide and worldwide wattage that he was such an eloquently humorous Arizona cowboy. Baffert has refined the lifelong horseman’s tough aw-shucks estimation of the world right into a type of trackside poetry.

That is the rationale that his precipitous fall from grace within the final twelve months is such an open wound for the game. Folks throughout the nation miss him, miss his power, miss his jokes and asides, and can proceed to overlook his horses as he serves out his ban.

For his half, Taiba is a paradigmatic Baffert horse, arriving roughly out of nowhere to take a slot within the 2022 Derby gate in a single hundred-point masterstroke by taking the Santa Anita Derby. Taiba’s inexperience is monumental, and it’s a testomony to Baffert’s all-hands-on-deck reasonably army model of coaching that the horse is as unperturbed and able to work as he appears. This horse shall be an element among the many favorites on Saturday afternoon.

What we will say concerning the 148th operating of the Kentucky Derby is that Baffert is, again with out, legally, being allowed to be again. The irony is simple: With Taiba, Baffert’s most attribute and marketable mark in commerce — that freaky, thrilling factor of unpredictability that the horseman in him brings to the very high tier of the rivals — is the extremely sturdy hint of the coach that continues to be on the observe and on this hotly-contested race this yr.