And Noodles died May 22 of a non-exercise induced respiratory issue. Horse trainer Bob Baffert, left, leaves federal court in Brooklyn on July 12. The first two infractions occurred in May 2020, when the horses Charlatan and Gamine tested positive in Arkansas for lidocaine, a numbing agent. Rick Arthur, Californias medical equine director, who the documents show played a central role in the scuttling of the Justify matter, said the only part of the CHRBs handling of the case that disappointed him was the secrecy. And Ive warned them that this was not going to stay a secret at the time, he testified of the CHRB, but that was their decision, not mine. (Baedeker, who retired last year, told The Post they couldnt legally disclose the test results because CHRB did not file a complaint.). The timing of the legislation was coincidental, he added: I understand where youre going and why, but there were no connections, from my perspective., Brewster, attorney for Medina Spirits owner, also said that Bafferts issue with Arthur was about Lasix and that the timing was irrelevant.. The lawyer wrote there is evidence suggesting that this matter was handled differently.. Real Quiet won the Preakness as well, but, like Silver Charm, the horse was denied a Triple Crown win and finished second in the Belmont Stakes by a nose. Baffert won his first race as a thoroughbred trainer Jan. 28, 1979, saddling Flipper Star to a victory at Rillito in Arizona. Arthur is retiring at the end of June from a job often consumed by the scandals of a single trainer. Bafferts lawyer called as a defense witness Arthur, who testified that his handling of the case was the fault of Californias cumbersome regulatory process. He declared, I considered this a horse poisoning, not a horse drugging., After the hearing, Santa Anitas Board of Stewards, a three-person panel that rules on drug cases, dismissed the complaints. Racing lacks a central clearinghouse for data on deaths nationally, and regulators in many states do not track deaths by trainer. Nothing is more important than the health and safety of our equine and human athletes, Baffert wrote, and nothing impacts their health and safety more than the policies and procedures concerning drugs.. (Arthur and those involved with the bill said the actions were unrelated. The new classification simply makes more sense pharmacologically, Arthur wrote. If they didnt adopt those rules, the rules that prevail are the ones they adopted.. He was fined $1,500. The Jockey Club has a database of thoroughbred breakdowns meaning deaths stemming from track injuries but said it is barred from sharing its data because of its contracts with racetracks. [11], Prior to Medina Spirit's death, Baffert had last been under intense scrutiny a decade earlier when seven horses in his stables at Hollywood Park died between November 2, 2011 and March 14, 2013, all from sudden and later unexplained heart attacks. Were going to get through it.. May 10, 2021. Scopolamine, Baedeker wrote, can be injected but very often is the result of feed or straw that has been contaminated with Jimson weed., Arthur had previously suggested he didnt consider Jimson weed contamination to be a serious threat, writing in a 2016 memo that the likelihood under our current procedures of getting a positive from environmental contamination is rather low. In an interview this week, Arthur said he meant that such incidences were infrequent but said that in California, if you have a scopolamine positive, its going to be associated with Jimson weed thats just the reality of it., On April 26, records show, Arthur emailed CHRB officials that he had talked to Bob and informed him the proceedings would not immediately interfere with Justifys Triple Crown schedule. Every investigation over the past 20 years has reached the same conclusion: no rules or regulations have been violated nor has there been any improper activity on Bobs part., Brewster also said that the vast majority of Bafferts drug-related violations, as tracked by ARCI, shouldnt be counted because they were too old or related to overages of otherwise-allowed drugs in a horse, which he dismissed as like coming to work with too much Advil in your system., Robertson said in an e-mail that [n]o one has done more for horse racing and is better for the sport than Bob Baffert, and he listed various awards the trainer has received, including being inducted into four separate Hall of Fames. FILE - In this Monday July 12, 2021 file photo, horse trainer Bob Baffert leaves federal court in the Brooklyn borough of New York. He has won the Kentucky Oaks three times: first in 1999 with Silverbulletday, who was later selected for the Hall of Fame, then with Plum Pretty in 2011 and with Abel Tasman in 2017. The ARCI rules are recommendations, the associations president, Ed Martin, said in an interview. It was then that Baffert, one of the most accessible trainers in horse racing, stopped talking until this week. A complaint is filed in every case where the split sample confirms the original laboratory finding, read an advisory on the CHRB website. In 2013 the group hosted a Lasix-focused event at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills at which one owner reportedly said running a race without the drug was like waterboarding your horse in their own blood.. Following the publication of the report, Baffert tweeted: Im gratified that CHRB completed its investigation & found there was no wrongdoing. He also can be found at the Olympics, having just finished the Tokyo and Beijing double, marking his 11th Olympics. And promote he does, chatting with people he met one minute ago as if they were long-lost friends. All of the explanations for the positive drug tests are plausible, but collectively they raise questions. Some of the horses that have died have been my horses, and on each and every instance, I have spoken to Bob and Ive been more than satisfied with the explanation, Shah said. Theres one thing that I will say positive about Bob is that he is a horseman. He also dismissed complaints that doping was rampant in the sport. Betamethasone is mostly injected into the joints of horses to ease inflammation and, if the inflammation is reduced, any associated pain subsides. I felt that we wouldve been dumping this in their lap, that we wouldve been putting them in an unfair position, and that we needed to go ahead and do the difficult thing, quite frankly, which is take responsibility for the decision, Baedeker said. When he was 10, his father purchased some Quarter Horses and he practiced racing them on a dirt track. [10], Controversy deepened when on December 6, 2021, Medina Spirit died of an apparent heart attack after a workout at Santa Anita Park. Kentucky regulators taped calls without consent with Baffert after Medina Spirit test. [19][20] On May 11, Baffert stated Medina Spirit had dermatitis, for which an ointment containing betamethasone was used. See, I bet you didnt know I was a jockey? Baffert said. Board member Michael E. Pegram had for decades hired Baffert to train his top horses, including the winner of the 1998 Kentucky Derby, Real Quiet. In 1997, he trained Silver Charm to win the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, finishing second in the Belmont. Four months later, during a confidential executive session, Arthur and CHRB Director Rick Baedeker recommended that the commissioners not move forward with the disqualification of Justify, arguing that the scopolamine positive was probably the result of contamination from jimson weed. After winning the Santa Anita Derby in April of that year, Bafferts Justify tested positive for scopolamine, a banned substance, which normally would have disqualified the victory and made the horse ineligible to run in that years Kentucky Derby. The month after that, Grays bill to limit Arthurs term was passed out of a committee. In a hearing in October, the state and attorneys for Baffert and the horses owners stipulated the scopolamine positive was the result of contamination and it would have no performance-enhancing effects. The consolation is knowing the truth will come out as the process plays out. But in 2018, Arthur was still on the job when another Baffert-trained horse tested regulators willingness to challenge him. He declined to answer further questions. Baffert often speaks of his life as if its a Shakespearean play, humankinds tragedies mingling with his own existential crises. Brodnik presented the board with a two-page memo stating an extensive investigation was conducted and the evidence proves that this was an environmental contamination incident. Baedeker and Arthur recommended the pending matters against Baffert be dismissed, according to the states legal analysis. Bob had the personality and he was honest. If you lose 75% of the time, youre considered really, really good. At one point, the regulators effort included searching for exonerating evidence in a literal haystack. His reasoning was that Baffert also administered thyroxine to horses outside of Hollywood Park, where his horses did not suffer sudden deaths. This included Baffert's home track at Santa Anita, although Baffert horse Shaaz won the sixth race on April 2. Does his love of the camera sometimes bite him? asked longtime owner and friend Mike Pegram. Baffert was recently suspended for 90 days by the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission, California Horse Racing Board, and the New York State Gaming Commission for drug violations in the 2021 Kentucky . Baffert said the horse was off the drug for 18 days before the race. But the star trainers sudden support belied the fact that Baffert has for years been entangled with the very problems he blamed for his sports potential demise: drugs, dead horses and a feckless regulatory system. A New York federal judge on Wednesday, July 14, 2021 nullified the suspension of horse trainer Bob Baffert, finding that the New York Racing Association acted unconstitutionally by failing to let him adequately respond to claims made against him after Kentucky . [2], Baffert graduated from the University of Arizona's Race Track Industry Program with a Bachelor of Science degree,[3] got married, and began training quarter horses at a Prescott, Arizona farm. Longtime client Mike Pegram explained, "Anybody who walks with that swagger, people are going to love him or hate himhe's a wiseass and irreverent." The majority of the deaths in Bafferts care are attributed to breakdowns, though others have died suddenly without explanation and some of the horses suffered illness including his most recent death, Noodles, in May where pneumonia was the suspected cause. All they show is contamination, and they have really put the trainers heads on the chopping blocks. The deadliest period came between 2000 and 2005, when 34 of Bafferts horses in California died. The owners ultimately abandoned the plan after Bafferts horse, American Pharoah, won the Triple Crown that year, fearing their effort could damage the sport, one of those people said. John Cherwa is a special contributor to the Los Angeles Times. And in the 13 months following his essay in The Post, Bafferts horses tested positive for prohibited or excessive substances five times in three states. But in the most recent election in June, he finished seventh of eight, the only incumbent beaten. Currently, his major coverage area is horse racing, where he can be found at big races at Santa Anita, the Triple Crown series and Breeders Cup. The. But Arthurs report said Hollywood Park used a different sort of poison than that found in the necropsy. Baffert's horses have won a record six Kentucky Derbies, seven Preakness Stakes, three Belmont Stakes, and three Kentucky Oaks . None of them are considered performance-enhancing in the traditional sense, such as amphetamines or speedballs. LOS ALAMITOS, Calif. High Connection won the $125,000 Los Alamitos Derby by 1 3/4 lengths Saturday, giving trainer Bob Baffert his second victory on the card in his return to competition after serving a 90-day suspension. Robert A. Baffert (born January 13, 1953) is an American racehorse trainer who trained the 2015 Triple Crown winner American Pharoah and 2018 Triple Crown winner Justify. Gray said at the time that the bill also would increase the institutional knowledge of Californias central horse drug-testing lab. This America's different." pic . Bob survived a heart attack in late March 2012 while in Dubai for a world-class race at Meydan. Bell told an investigator he then checked other bales and found a branch and pods he thought were Jimson weed in the parking lot. Baffert failed in multiple attempts in Kentucky to overturn the track's ban or the start of his suspension, which began April 4. "So now even our Kentucky Derby winner, Medina Spirit, is a junky," Trump's statement read. The average death rate for racehorses in California, according to an analysis of more than 5,000 deaths since 2000, is 7.2 per 1,000 starts. Even then, he would not talk about the specifics of the cases against him. [27][28] On July 14 the suspension was reversed by U. S. Federal District Court Judge Carol Bagley Amon sitting in the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn. He saddled Paynter in the Belmont Stakes later that year, but that colt, like his stablemate Bodemeister, finished second. This pattern has bred frustration among some horsemen. In July 2020, Merneith tested positive for dextromethorphan, a drug commonly used in cough medicine. What I can tell you definitely is this case was handled differently, and it was handled differently because of Rick Arthur, said Ruiss attorney, Darrell Vienna. Baffert has been married twice and has five children: four with his first wife, Sherry: Taylor, Canyon, Forest, and Savannah. Biography Bob Baffert is best known as a horse rider. By Marty Irby. Citrus Feed Companys Larry Bell has long supplied Baffert with feed and has previously testified in Bafferts defense, according to CHRB records. Baffert wants a preliminary injunction that would keep Churchill Downs from denying his horses entry into races there and at Turfway Park, in Florence, Ky., and from "prohibiting him from earning. Baffert, a La Caada Flintridge resident who is currently training his horses at Santa Anita, has not officially been charged with anything related to Medina Spirit. Baffert, however, wouldnt change the outcome. The testing levels have become ridiculous, Baffert told a conference of racehorse veterinarians during his keynote speech in 2000, according to a trade publication. Without that win, Justify would not have qualified to run in the Kentucky Derby, the first leg of the Triple Crown, a month later. Shah said the two parted over disagreements that should have been resolved, without being specific. The week after Justify won the Preakness, bringing him to the cusp of the Triple Crown, test results came back showing the plant they had tested was milkweed. By age 20, he had developed a reputation as a trainer and was hired by other trainers to run their stables. Decorated racehorse trainer who won multiple Kentucky Derbies, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont Stakes. Some of the earlier violations do give you pause. The substance was indeed Jimson weed. Baffert made the. Racing does not have a historical database for violations, with most of the information kept on the state level. [8] His first suspension was in 1977 for misuse of morphene, but thereafter he had no violations for the next eight years. But that number may drop to six if the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission disqualifies this years winner, Medina Spirit, for a medication violation, the trainers fifth since May 2020. . No sanctions were issued against Baffert.[40][41]. (The trainer and jockey usually get 10 percent each.) followed up and ruled Baffert would not be allowed to run in New York. Whether youre a lifelong resident of D.C. or you just moved here, weve got you covered. His attorney, let me just say, worked very, very hard, recalled former California Deputy Attorney General Jerald L. Mosley, who represented the state in attempting to uphold the suspension. The colt skipped the Belmont Stakes but became the champion three-year-old colt that year. In that period, 36% of all cardiac related horse deaths in California were animals trained by Baffert. Bob Baffert has supporters and detractors in how he deals with jockeys By John Cherwa Special Contributor Nov. 2, 2016 4:28 PM PT Bob Baffert, still fresh and snappy after hours of morning. Another day passed before it was discovered the colt was administered a topical ointment for a rash that contained betamethasone. Following the 2015 Belmont win, Baffert outlined several charities that he and his wife Jill supported. was. It will all be settled by lawyers and judges and that takes time. Those who have known Baffert the longest, including a core group of owners, recognize his flaws but generally remain steadfast in their support of him. I told him there would be nothing from CHRB before the KY Derby, unlikely before the Preakness and possibly not until after the Belmont, Arthur wrote. Baffert sued in federal court, claiming the two months off could cost him $11 million in purses. "[16][17] Nonetheless, Churchill Downs suspended Baffert from entering any horses at their racetrack pending the outcome of an investigation. Hell do anything to win, and hes got all his bases covered politically, Barry Irwin, owner of 2011 Kentucky Derby winner Animal Kingdom, said of Baffert. In 2015, the Daily Herald ran a profile on Jill Baffert, explaining that she was a former journalist and waitress from Centerville. Baffert, however, became the first trainer in history to win the Derby and Preakness in back-to-back years. [45], Last edited on 11 February 2023, at 14:09, American Pharoah Stakes / FrontRunner Stakes / Norfolk Stakes, Gold Cup at Santa Anita Stakes / Hollywood Gold Cup Handicap, Los Alamitos Futurity / Hollywood Futurity, Starlet Stakes / Hollywood Starlet Stakes, United States Champion Trainer by earnings, American Champion Three-Year-Old Male Horse, American Champion Two-Year-Old Male Horse, "Bob Baffert Has Come a Long Way in Horse Racing", "Baffert nears $300M mark with an all-star stable", "American Pharoah claims first Triple Crown since 1978", "Bob Baffert no stranger to failed drug tests by his horses", "Press Release Racing Museum April 20, 2009", "The last stand of Bob Baffert, horse racing's most successful and embattled trainer", "Medina Spirit's Kentucky Derby win in doubt after postrace drug test", "Kentucky Horse Racing Commission Withdrawal Guidelines Thoroughbred; Standardbred; Quarter Horse, Appaloosa, and Arabian", "Baffert: Meds applied to Derby winner had steroid", "Medina Spirit Tests Positive for Betamethasone", "Baffert says Derby winner Medina Spirit tested positive", "Churchill Downs' Statement in Response to Medina Spirit's Post-Race Test Result Allegations", "Trainer: Kentucky Derby winner faces disqualification due to 'cancel culture', "Bob Baffert asserts Medina Spirit's Kentucky Derby win was valid, invokes 'cancel culture', "Bob Baffert says Kentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit was treated with ointment that contained steroid", "Baffert Has Turned Medina Spirit Controversy Into a Circus", "Baffert's Leaking Credibility Reaches Saturation Point", "Churchill Downs Inc. suspends Baffert for 2 years", "Trainer Bob Baffert suspended from entering Medina Spirit, other horses at Belmont Park", "New York Racing Officials Suspend Baffert From Belmont Stakes", "Trainer Bob Baffert sues to get New York suspension lifted", "Horse trainer Bob Baffert sues New York racing officials over suspension", "Baffert sues to overturn New York racing ban", "Judge nullifies horse trainer Bob Baffert's NY suspension", "Baffert charged by New York Racing, scheduled for hearing", "Legendary horse trainer charged again following Kentucky Derby scandal", "NYRA Amends Charges Against Baffert to Include Bute Overages", "The Seattle Times | Local news, sports, business, politics, entertainment, travel, restaurants and opinion for Seattle and the Pacific Northwest", "Bob Baffert fined $1,500, Gamine disqualified from third-place finish in Kentucky Oaks", "Here's what we know following Kentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit's positive drug test", "Medina Spirit Dies of Apparent Heart Attack at Santa Anita", "Baffert Horses Big Part of Sudden Death Spike", "Report on the investigation and review of the seven sudden deaths on the Hollywood Park main track of horses trained by Bob Baffert and stabled in Barn 61", "Cardiac Failure Fatalities Spike in California, Baffert Barn", "Bafferts Make Whopper Of A Donation To Equine Charities", "Bafferts, Espinoza donate Belmont winnings", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bob_Baffert&oldid=1138770123, This page was last edited on 11 February 2023, at 14:09. Less than two weeks later, Medina Spirit won the Kentucky Derby. LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WAVE) - Testimonies have begun in the case of horse trainer Bob Baffert against Churchill Downs. By then, Bafferts encounters with regulators dated back decades, to 1977, when he served a yearlong suspension for racing a horse on morphine. We went there with expectations not very high. Baffert told investigators he used the drug for about five years to build up his horses, which Arthur noted was unusual because it was typically used to slim them down. It went exactly according to the lawyers plan. Teflon."[11]. In winning the 141st Kentucky Derby, bringing his total number of victories in the race to four; Baffert also ran the third-place finisher, the previously undefeated colt Dortmund. [As for whats going on now,] I dont like it but Im dealing with it. It was an easy suspension to serve as Baffert was in school and not doing much training. Finding a new director every two to four years would cost $300,000 each time, a committee that analyzed the bill found. Its not uncommon to find trainers who dont understand medications and how different medications work, Arthur said. But even in those cases, which were handled according to established rules, the horses were disqualified and their winning purses were forfeited. As The Post reported in April, the Jockey Club, an industry group of top thoroughbred owners, then hired the same private agency, 5 Stones Intelligence, to probe suspected dopers. His American Pharaoh horse won the Triple Crown in 2015. California counts all fatalities of horses in a trainers care, including breakdowns during training, not just racing deaths. From there, he moved to racing at recognized tracks, scoring his first victory at age 17 in 1970. But they dont usually die in a cluster from a single barn for no clear reason. He has often blamed drug positives on trace contamination from substances in a horses barn and has criticized tightening restrictions on the race-day use of bute and other drugs. CHRB brass agreed to follow Arthurs suggestion. Attorneys for Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert argued in a Kentucky court Thursday that a 90-day suspension imposed by the state's racing commission would essentially end his career. Baffert was suspended by the NYRA on May 17 -- a big deal as it barred the legendary horse trainer from entering into the prestigious June 5 Belmont Stakes race.