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

With the 2022 Kentucky Derby fast approaching on May 7 at Churchill Downs, Epicenter and Zandon still seem to be twinned at the top of the class, with White Abarrio, Cyberknife and the lightly-raced Santa Anita Derby winner Taiba not far behind. Taiba is interesting for two reasons, foremost, not many horses with just two races under their belt even manage to make it into a Kentucky Derby field. But Taiba is arguably more interesting because, until April 4, he was being trained by the nationally banned six-time Kentucky Derby winner Bob Baffert, who, losing his court appeal of his 90-day Kentucky Horse Racing Commission ban on April 1, passed Taiba to his former assistant Tim Yakteen so that the horse could enter the Derby. The long and short of it is, despite the trainer’s national ban, a Baffert horse will run in the 2022 Derby.

Just two trainers in the Derby’s 148-year history have won the race six times; Baffert is one of them. Famously, he’s won the Preakness seven times and the Triple Crown twice. Slick, sociable, never at a loss for a quip, and retaining an innate cowboy swagger deep in the DNA inherited from his Nogales, Arizona, cattle-rancher father, Baffert cut a winning, handsome figure at racetracks across the country. But a week out from the 2022 Derby at Churchill Downs, one could argue that Baffert has cast a long patchwork shadow in his sport even without the ugly and — for the athlete himself, who collapsed and died in training at Baffert’s home track of Santa Anita — ultimately tragic Medina Spirit disqualification saga of 2021.

Baffert’s involuntary breather from his ordinarily busy Triple Crown season this year gives us a bit of an opportunity to reflect on the Baffert efffect, namely, the roller-coaster ride that the events surrounding Medina Spirit’s disgraced 2021 Derby campaign have brought us. First, it’s possible to argue, as Baffert’s attorneys consistently do, that the topical ointment containing betamethasone that was reportedly the source of the picograms of the substance found in Medina Spirit’s race-day samples, was being administered to the horse to treat a skin lesion and thus didn’t violate the spirit of the Kentucky race-day ban, which centers on betamethasone being more invasively injected for (illegal) orthopedic relief.

Mind you, betamethasone is legal in Kentucky and elsewhere. It’s just banned in Kentucky on race days. But what that also means is that the trainers and their vets will be highly educated about the ability of the equine body to metabolize the substance.

Churchill’s and the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission’s position is that it would have been extremely difficult for Baffert or anybody in his Churchill barn — having raced in Kentucky as much as they have — not to know that Kentucky bans the use of betamethasone on race days. The Derby being a fairly well-known race day.

Nevertheless: Sentenced to a 90-day ban from racing in February for Medina Spirit’s repeated positive tests by the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission atop Churchill Downs’ earlier and slightly more direct ban preventing him from entering any horse in any race at the track through 2023, Mr. Baffert has been fighting a rear-guard retreat not unlike Napoleon’s infamously bloody retreat from Moscow in 1804. Which is to say, his troubles only appear to grow as other bans Baffert has suffered, and other quite outlandish excuses that he’s made for them, have been picked up and re-examined.