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Bob Baffert at the Breeders’ Cup: Awash in Favorites and Suspicion

Horse racing is under scrutiny again, as its top American trainer comes to the season’s final event with a record of four failed drug tests in the past six months.

Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

In 1976, a part-time college student and fledgling trainer named Bob Baffert gave one of his horses a banned substance — partly out of ignorance, he wrote in an autobiography, and partly out of desperation to win. After the horse tested positive for morphine, Baffert was summoned to Sacramento by California regulators.

“They told me what I did was very serious, but I seemed like a nice kid,” Baffert wrote in “Baffert: Dirt Road to the Derby,” his 1999 autobiography. “So they suspended me for a year, and made it retroactive. I had already done six months and I really didn’t care. I was going to school and wasn’t training anyway. I just wanted to get all this over with.”

Forty-four years later, Baffert is the most decorated trainer in American horse racing. Like Lance Armstrong in cycling, he has dominated his sport, winning the Kentucky Derby six times and sweeping the Triple Crown twice in the last five years. And like Armstrong, Baffert has gained the enmity of rivals who believe that he has persistently cheated, suspicions fueled by the 29 drug tests failed by his horses over the four decades, including four in the past six months.

The cases took months, if not years, to adjudicate and were met mostly with modest fines or brief suspensions, as Baffert asserted he did nothing wrong and blamed the results on environmental contamination or human error.

He declined to be interviewed, but on Wednesday, facing mounting criticism, he apologized for the violations and promised to be more vigilant in the future.

“I am very aware of the several incidents this year concerning my horses and the impact it has had on my family, horse racing, and me,” Baffert said in a statement. “I want to have a positive influence on the sport of horse racing. Horses have been my life and I owe everything to them and the tremendous sport in which I have been so fortunate to be involved.”

Still, ahead of the season-ending Breeders’ Cup World Championships this weekend, horse racing’s leaders again must defend a culture in which performance-enhancing and painkilling drugs, combined with lax state regulations, undermine the credibility of the sport, one of America’s oldest, and threaten the well-being of the animals who define it.

Baffert will saddle a powerful contingent of high-priced horses from some of the world’s deepest pocketed owners at the Breeders’ Cup, to be held at Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, Ky. Among them is Gamine, considered one of the favorites to win the $1 million Filly & Mare Sprint race. She has failed two recent drug tests — one in May and another after finishing third in the prestigious Kentucky Oaks in September.

In the $6 million Classic, the premier race of the Breeders’ Cup, Baffert will send out the three favorites, including Maximum Security, whose previous trainer, Jason Servis, was one of 30 people involved in the sport who was indicted this spring by federal prosecutors on doping charges.

The leaders of the Breeders’ Cup, a Super Bowl of sorts for horseplayers, have been loud proponents of drug-free racing, but they have declined to ban Baffert from the event.

In fact, seven of its 14 board members employ Baffert as their trainer. Two of them, Gavin Murphy of SF Bloodstock, which is associated with the billionaire George Soros, and Elliott Walden, president of WinStar Farm, will send out a horse named Improbable as the favorite in the Classic.

None of the seven responded to phone calls and emails to comment on their business arrangements with Baffert.

“While these most recent charges are being adjudicated, Bob Baffert is not under suspension in any jurisdiction in the U.S., is not in violation of any Kentucky regulations or any existing Breeders’ Cup rules, and, as of now, is not prohibited from participating in the 2020 Breeders’ Cup World Championships,” Drew Fleming, the organization’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

The failure to act has angered some prominent players in the sport.

Until owners stop sending him horses “they will continue to be part of the problem. It’s a joke that isn’t funny,” tweeted Daisy Phipps Pulito, whose family has been among the most distinguished breeders and owners in the sport for generations.

In 2011, another well-known trainer, Rick Dutrow, who won the 2008 Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes with Big Brown, was punished for doping violations similar to Baffert’s. He was banned from racing in the United States for 10 years.

Ed Martin, the president of the Association of Racing Commissioners International, had asked New York regulators to review Dutrow’s license. “How many so-called honest mistakes can one have,” he wrote to the regulators, “before you question whether there has been a total disregard for adherence to the rules?”

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Justify wins the Belmont Stakes in 2018, claiming a Triple Crown. He had failed a drug test before the Kentucky Derby but regulators let him race pending an investigation that eventually cleared him.Credit...Emma Howells/The New York Times

Some of the test results have come after prominent finishes.

The Baffert horse Merneith finished second in a race near San Diego on July 25 and was found to have excessive amounts of Dextrorphan in her blood or urine after the race. Baffert said a member of his staff was sick with Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and was taking cough syrup that contained Dextrorphan, though he did not offer an explanation for how it got in the horse.

In May, Gamine and a colt named Charlatan, who won a division of the Arkansas Derby, tested positive for lidocaine, a numbing agent. Baffert, who was suspended for 15 days by Arkansas regulators, said his assistant was wearing a pain patch for a bad back and had inadvertently contaminated the horses.

In Kentucky, Gamine tested positive for betamethasone, a corticosteroid injected into joints to reduce pain and swelling. If the test result is upheld, the owners of Gamine will have to forfeit the $120,000 she earned for finishing third in the Oaks.

The day after Gamine failed the Oaks drug test, Baffert won his sixth Derby, with the colt Authentic, and tied Ben Jones for the most victories in the race.

Many in the sport believe that horse racing can no longer make promises to do better or police itself if it is to survive.

“The overmedication of racehorses is cultural and needs a course correction,” Jim Gagliano, the president and chief operating officer of the Jockey Club, the oldest horse-racing organization in the U.S., said recently.

To that end, the Jockey Club and others in the industry have supported the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act, a federal bill that would give the United States Anti-Doping Agency, which revealed Armstrong’s cheating and issued a lifetime suspension in 2012, the authority to create a regulatory plan with meaningful penalties to clean up the sport. It has been approved by the House of Representatives and has bipartisan support in the Senate, where it is expected to come to a vote within the next few weeks.

The ultimate goal of the legislation is to establish uniform national regulations and independent oversight in a sport that is fractiously governed and notorious for conflicts of interests.

Last year, The New York Times reported that Justify — also trained by Baffert — had failed a drug test after winning the 2018 Santa Anita Derby in Southern California. The rule at the time required that Justify be disqualified, forfeiting both his prize money and preventing his entry into the Kentucky Derby a month later.

The California Horse Racing Board’s chairman at the time, Chuck Winner, had previously employed Baffert to train his horses. Justify’s failed test was investigated for four months, allowing the horse to keep competing long enough to win not only the Derby, but also the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes to become the 13th Triple Crown winner.

In August 2018, after Justify’s breeding rights had been sold for $60 million, the racing board ruled that the failed test was the result of environmental contamination and disposed of the inquiry altogether during a rare closed-door session.

Last week, as part of settlement of a lawsuit brought against the racing board by the owner of the second-place finisher, Bolt d’Oro, California regulators heard testimony that will help them decide whether to erase Justify’s Santa Anita Derby win and force his owners to forfeit the $600,000 first-place check.

“What makes this case remarkable is how a cabal within the C.H.R.B. sought to ensure the secrecy of the positive test by treating Bob differently from other trainers,” said Carlo Fisco, a lawyer for Mick Ruis, Bolt d’Oro’s trainer. “No trainer, no matter how successful, should be treated differently.”

In the meantime, said Barry Irwin, founder of the Team Valor International stable, the sport suffers. His partnership captured the 2011 Kentucky Derby with Animal Kingdom and has won other prestigious races across the country. Now, however, Team Valor is racing predominantly in Europe.

“The only way I come back is if I see that the legislation bears fruit,” Irwin said in an interview. “Our goal is to win the biggest races. What ran me out is that they have become difficult to win because of the cheaters.”

Joe Drape has been writing about the intersection of sports, culture and money since coming to The Times in 1998. He has also pursued these lines of reporting as the author of two best-selling books. More about Joe Drape

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: Baffert Enters Breeders’ Cup Trailed by Suspicion. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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