Medina Spirit | Horse Racing Free Tips

Medina Spirit Team Claims Proof Derby Drug Overage Came from Ointment

The legal teams for the trainer and owner of GI Kentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit (Protonico) jointly issued statements after 6:00 p.m. Friday stating that long-awaited split-sample testing has finally been completed on the colt's urine that “definitively confirmed” and has “scientifically proven” that the type of betamethasone that showed up in his post-race positive test is the type that comes from a topical ointment and not via an intra-articular injection.

The distinction is important to trainer Bob Baffert and owner Zedan Racing Stables (Amr Zedan) because they believe the proper adjudication of the betamethasone overage hinges on how it was administered to Medina Spirit.

In the wake of the positive findings, they claimed that Medina Spirit was treated with the betamethasone-containing ointment Otomax as late as Apr. 30 (the day before his Derby win) to help deal with a skin lesion. They have denied that the colt's joints were ever treated with the injectable form of that drug.

“The betamethasone in an injection is betamethasone acetate. The betamethasone in the topical ointment is betamethasone valerate. Only betamethasone acetate is addressed and regulated in the rules of racing in Kentucky. Thus, the presence of betamethasone valerate in Medina Spirit, which resulted from a topical ointment, is not a rules violation,” W. Craig Robertson, Baffert's lead attorney, stated in a press release.

Robertson continued, citing findings from the New York Equine Drug Testing and Research Laboratory's director, George Maylin:

“Dr. Maylin's testing not only confirmed the presence of betamethasone valerate, but also the absence of betamethasone acetate. This should definitively resolve the matter in Kentucky and Medina Spirit should remain the official winner of the 2021 Kentucky Derby.”

Early Friday evening, TDN asked Marc Guilfoil, the executive director of the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission (KHRC), if his agency could confirm the findings that were announced by Medina Spirit's connections.

“I haven't seen it, so we can't confirm anything,” Guilfoil said via phone.

When asked if a finding of betamethasone from an ointment and not an injection would change anything related to how Medina Spirit's overage of betamethasone would be handled, Guilfoil said, “We cannot comment on an ongoing investigation.”

Clark Brewster, an attorney representing Zedan, stated in a press release that the new finding should change the trajectory of how the case gets settled.

“The KHRC has steadfastly enacted rules relating to corticosteroid joint injection and have drawn a bright-line rule that no injections are permitted within 14 days of a race,” Brewster stated. “Now there is zero doubt that the 14-day rule some thought might have been violated by the earlier less-specific testing is revealed as premature judgment. That groundless accusation is without scientific merit.”

TDN asked Guilfoil if Robertson's and Brewster's interpretations of the KHRC rule were correct, and whether or not the rules relating to the Class C violation for betamethasone in Kentucky made any distinction pertaining to how the substance got inside a horse.

“I can't comment on it. I don't have a rule book in front of me, and anyway it would be a question for our lawyer. We're in litigation, and we can't comment on ongoing litigation,” Guilfoil said.

Guilfoil was referring to the June 7 civil complaint Medina Spirit's connections filed against the KHRC that forced the agency to turn over the colt's post-race urine sample to the New York lab for independent testing.

Robertson's statement read, in part: “In other words, it has now been scientifically proven that what Bob Baffert said from the beginning was true–Medina Spirit was never injected with betamethasone and the findings following the Kentucky Derby were solely the result of the horse being treated for a skin condition by way of a topical ointment–all at the direction of Medina Spirit's veterinarian.”

Eight days after the Derby, on Sunday, May 9, Baffert first disclosed the betamethasone positive at a press conference outside the barn where Medina Spirit was stabled at Churchill Downs. In doing so, he was getting out in front of the official announcement that would come later by the KHRC.

But Baffert didn't actually bring up the possibility that an ointment had triggered the positive until two days later, on Tuesday, May 11.

At first, on May 9, Baffert chose to implicate circumstances as the hazy, underlying culprit in the case (“I don't know what is going on with the regulators…. It's a complete injustice…. It's getting worse, and this is something that has to be addressed by the industry…. [This is] the biggest gut punch in racing for something that I didn't do”).

But as TDN's Bill Finley reported when Baffert's legal team put out a press release two days later implicating the ointment, “Baffert reversed course after declaring emphatically earlier in the week that the horse had never been treated with betamethasone. The trainer now says that he was not aware until [May 10] that the ointment in question, called Otomax, contained betamethasone. Betamethasone is clearly listed as an ingredient in Otomax on the box containing the drug.”

When asked at that time by TDN how a veterinarian could have given the horse Otomax so close to the most important horse race in America without knowing it could result in a drug positive, Robertson replied, “That's a question you're going to have to ask the veterinarian. I don't want to be quoted as throwing the veterinarian under the bus either. Listen: I don't know the answer to that question. I just don't.”

Although Medina Spirit's veterinarian was once again alluded to in the Dec. 3 statements, neither Baffert nor Zedan has publicly named that doctor, nor have they addressed why the Otomax was administered so close to the Derby in the first place.

The fallout from the betamethasone overage–which hasn't even resulted in a KHRC hearing yet, let alone any official ruling–has been costly to Baffert (in terms of being banned by some tracks) and to the sport (in terms yet another crisis that delivers an outsized hit to the game's public image).

The gaming corporation that owns Churchill Downs has barred Baffert from competing at its portfolio of tracks for two years, and none of his A-list 2-year-olds, including likely champion juvenile Corniche (Quality Road), are being allowed to accrue 2022 Derby qualifying points to get into the race Baffert has won seven times.

Baffert has also been barred from competing at the New York Racing Association (NYRA)'s tracks, but in July he secured a preliminary injunction in the courts that still allows him to race there until that lawsuit is resolved in full.

Although his ruling-off by NYRA came eight days after Medina Spirit's betamethasone positive was first made public, NYRA has claimed that its banishment of him has more to do with his pattern of equine drug positives: In the 12 months prior to Medina Spirit's finding from the Derby, four other Baffert trainees also tested positive for medication overages, two of them in Grade I stakes.

Baffert's attorneys have claimed throughout the ordeal that he's a victim in this case.

“Since May, Mr. Baffert has been the subject of an unfair rush to judgment,” Robertson stated in Friday's release. “We asked all along that everyone wait until the facts and science came to light. Now that it has been scientifically proven that Mr. Baffert was truthful, did not break any rules of racing, and Medina Spirit's victory was due solely to the heart and ability of the horse and nothing else, it is time for all members of racing to come together for the good of the sport. Mr. Baffert has been a tremendous ambassador for the sport throughout his 46-year Hall-of-Fame career and he has every intention of continuing to do so.”

Brewster stated that “Zedan is proud to have stood by Bob and is ecstatic that Medina Spirit will receive the honor of his great victory.”

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Report: Corniche to Freshen at WinStar Before Returning to Baffert

Presumptive 2-year-old champion male and GI Breeders' Cup Juvenile hero Corniche (Quality Road) will be freshened briefly at WinStar Farm in Kentucky this winter before returning to Bob Baffert's barn, according to a report in Daily Racing Form. Marette Farrell, who purchased the $1.5-million colt for Speedway Stable, said Corniche was sent to Kentucky last Wednesday.

“It's time to give him a little bit of a break,” Farrell told DRF. “Speedway likes to use WinStar for lay-ups. He can be turned out, graduate to a paddock, and they have a track, too. It's important to get a break mentally. A change of scenery is good for all of us.”

The ongoing subplot regarding Corniche and Baffert's other potential GI Kentucky Derby contenders is what the respective ownerships will do with their horses as the Derby, now a little over five months away, inches closer on the calendar. Baffert was suspended for two years from running horses at Churchill Downs after his Medina Spirit (Protonico) tested positive for an overage of betamethasone in this year's Derby.

If that suspension holds, it would likely prompt owners to move their horses from Baffert in time to run in the May 7 Derby. But for now, Peter Fluor and KC Weiner's Speedway is staying loyal to Baffert, as Farrell said the plan is to return Corniche to Baffert's barn at Santa Anita after his freshening.

“Peter wants to be loyal,” she said. “Corniche won the Breeders' Cup, and he's a possible 2-year-old champion. No decisions have been made–there hasn't even been any talk about another trainer, or who he'd go to if he needs to go to another trainer. If the time comes that a decision needs to be made, if it needs to be that way, we'll put our heads together and make a decision.”

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Baffert Amends Lawsuit to Attack NYRA’s Alleged ‘Sham’ Hearing

Bob Baffert filed an amended complaint on Friday in his ongoing constitutional rights court battle against the New York Racing Association (NYRA). The new sections of the revised lawsuit contain no new bombshell allegations, and largely mirror points previously voiced by his legal team regarding what they have described as a “sham” hearing process initiated by NYRA to determine if Baffert will be excluded from New York's premier tracks.

“The Sept. 10, 2021, 'Statement of Charges' which NYRA has asserted against Baffert are unquestionably vague and entirely subjective,” the amended complaint states. “The 'Statement of Charges' alleges that Baffert has engaged in: 1) 'conduct detrimental to the best interest of racing'; 2) 'conduct detrimental to the health and safety of horses and jockeys'; and 3) 'conduct detrimental to NYRA business operations.'”

The Nov. 19 revision filed in United States District Court (Eastern District of New York) goes on to state that “there are no articulable standards for establishing whether Baffert's conduct in other jurisdictions was detrimental.”

Thus, the amended complaint further states, “Under this vague framework, NYRA seeks to ignore [legal matters that have already been decided] in other jurisdictions and impose its own arbitrary punishment.”

The Hall of Fame trainer's initial version of this lawsuit dates back to June 14. It alleged NYRA violated his constitutional right to due process by trying to bar him over his history of equine medication violations.

NYRA had banished the seven-time GI Kentucky Derby-winning trainer back on May 17 after the Baffert-trained Medina Spirit (Protonico) tested positive for a betamethasone overage while winning the May 1 Run for the Roses.

That case has still not resulted in any Kentucky ruling against Baffert. In a separate testing endeavor, Baffert is trying to prove that Medina Spirit's betamethasone finding was the result of the application of an anti-fungal ointment and not an injection of that drug. The Blood-Horse reported Thursday that long-delayed testing of a urine specimen won't even begin until next week.

But NYRA's desire to rule off Baffert goes beyond Medina Spirit's still-in-limbo Derby penalization status. In the 12 months prior to Medina Spirit's positive, four other Baffert trainees also tested positive for medication overages, two of them in Grade I stakes.

On July 14 the court granted Baffert a preliminary injunction that allows him to race at New York's premier tracks until his lawsuit gets adjudicated in full.

But judge Carol Bagley Amon also wrote in that ruling that “Baffert should have been given notice of all of the reasons that NYRA intended to suspend him….[The] benefits of providing notice and a pre-suspension hearing would likely have been substantial.”

So in the wake of that decision, NYRA drafted a new set of procedures for holding hearings and issuing determinations designed to suspend licensees who engage in injurious conduct.

After those rules were made public, NYRA wrote a Sept. 10 letter summoning Baffert to appear at an exclusion hearing.

On Sept. 22, Baffert filed a motion asking the judge to hold NYRA in civil contempt for trying to schedule such a hearing and to stay the hearing itself. Both requests were denied.

Craig Robertson, the lead attorney on Baffert's legal team, then wrote an Oct. 21 letter to the judge asking to be allowed to amend the initial complaint to address the allegedly unfair hearing process. His argument, in part, stated that “The rules and procedures which NYRA has concocted for Baffert were all created after the fact.”

On Nov. 9, in an effort to move along the already cumbersome litigation process, Amon said she would allow Baffert to amend his complaint, because if she didn't, it is likely that he would simply file a new, separate lawsuit to get his allegations about the exclusion hearing ruled upon in court.

“NYRA purports to act pursuant to a new 'rule' that supposedly gives it the right to suspend Baffert for conduct occurring 'in any jurisdiction,'” the amended complaint now states.

“However, prior to this case, NYRA never had such a rule in place and never attempted to punish a trainer for conduct that occurred outside of the state of New York,” the complaint continues. “It created this rule (and the associated procedures) after the alleged misconduct occurred. It is a fundamental due process violation for NYRA to enact rules and procedures and attempt to apply them ex post facto.”

The new allegations further state that “There are numerous other trainers who, unlike Baffert, have actually run afoul of New York's rules of racing, but who NYRA continues to allow to race. NYRA's duplicitous actions make it clear that it has simply chosen to target Baffert for disparate treatment.”

Even as Baffert's legal team is fighting the exclusion hearing, it still must prepare for that process in the event that the court does not intervene to cancel it. The parties have mutually agreed to a Jan. 24 start date.

NYRA has until Dec. 3 to file its response to the amended complaint. When NYRA previously addressed the issue of the hearing in court documents, it termed Baffert's characterization of the process as “misguided,” noting that “Plaintiff s argument that he had no notice of the conduct prohibited by NYRA likewise fails given that common law has long recognized the standards and interests NYRA intends to uphold.”

NYRA had also previously pointed out to the judge that it was “providing Plaintiff exactly what he argued he was entitled to in support of his motion for a preliminary injunction-notice and an opportunity to be heard.”

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This Side Up: Another Fine Messier

Red Smith put it well; of course he did. So well, in fact, that he said it all over again. In 1975, writing one of the pieces that won a Pulitzer Prize the following year, Smith declared that Kentucky Derby week was “the only one in 52 when the instrument of Satan known as horse racing becomes a showpiece of the American sports scene.” Four years later, back at the same point in the cycle, he wrote that little old ladies in Wisconsin would this week be glad to learn that Spectacular Bid and Flying Paster are Thoroughbred racehorses–though there were “vast and sinless areas in this country where they and their like are regarded as instruments of Satan for the rest of the year.” In both pieces, he then quoted Johnny Rotz recalling his Illinois boyhood: “The only time the Decatur paper mentioned racing was to tell who won the Derby and how much money Eddie Arcaro had.”

This kind of thing, to be clear, is a precious prerogative of the fourth estate. We generally feel safe in assuming that nobody out there can be paying undue attention to our hasty scribblings. (Most of the time, candidly, we're banking on it.) And maybe Smith, in 1979, was facing one of those deadlines that loom with a disproportionate burden upon the first syllable. If so, he did well then to refine his theme in a characteristically picturesque formula: come Derby week, “sinless newspapers that wouldn't mention a horse any other time unless he kicked the mayor to death are suddenly full of information about steeds that will run and the people they will run for at Churchill Downs on the first Saturday of May.”

On the day we honor one of sport's great chroniclers, in the GII Red Smith S. at Aqueduct, we should perhaps be keeping this yearly pass from Main Street in mind. Because it is now clearly open season, when it comes to inflicting the benefit of our wisdom on the hapless owners of Corniche (Quality Road), along with others in the same barn now embarking on a GI Kentucky Derby trail that remains blocked, at a crossing up ahead, by a stranded locomotive.

For the time being, there's no sign of any engineers to get the thing moving again; just a bunch of lawyers prodding each other in the chest about who's to blame. And actually, unless I've missed something, none of the ongoing litigation concerns Bob Baffert's prohibition from the home of the Derby anyway. So something has to give–just not, please, the single week of the year when we get the indulgence of “sinless” America. Because if we're not careful, we're going to find ourselves shoving 20 “instruments of Satan” into the Derby starting gate.

Bob Baffert | Horsephotos

Now while Baffert may be accustomed to the feeling, for the guys who spent $1.5 million on Corniche this is a once-in-a-lifetime shot at the two-minute Grail that essentially drives the spending of billions on bloodstock every year. Similarly, for the many owners of Messier (Empire Maker), winner of the GIII Bob Hope S. at Del Mar last Sunday. And it is dreadfully unfair to turn their situation into some kind of test of loyalty, or character.

It's certainly no help to urge that there are plenty of other fish in the sea. With all the considerable respect due to its author, the notion that there is the faintest equivalence between this dilemma and Spend a Buck missing the Preakness, because he could earn more elsewhere, is still making my head hurt days after it appeared in these pages.

No two ways about it: if one of the 20,000-odd Thoroughbreds foaled in North America in 2019 combines eligibility and health to claim one of those 20 gates on May 7, 2022, then that's exactly what has to happen. It's atrocious that anyone, typically having spent a fortune enduring countless malicious torments by the racing gods, should finally see that Derby sunbeam break from the clouds, and light on their horse, only to be told that this is just a theatrical device for the measurement of their decency.

In those terms, anyhow, it's a lose-lose scenario. Half the chorus pronounces that a decent person would already have moved his horse from a barn that has, if only by inattention rather than calculation, tainted the reputation of our community among “sinless” Americans. The other half, meanwhile, suggests that a decent fellow would sit out the Derby and stand by their man.

That being so, perhaps the real test of decency faces Baffert himself. He has to fight his corner, naturally. He clearly feels besieged and aggrieved. But however marginal his culpability, he has to accept some responsibility for putting his patrons in such an invidious position. If he truly has the interests of the sport at heart, as he often protests, then there's a way he might win round a lot of sceptics.

He could say: “You know, I really feel that I don't deserve this kind of treatment, relative to the charges against me. You saw how my horses ran at the Breeders' Cup, where I couldn't even break wind in private. But I do understand that I've exasperated a lot of people, especially after telling the world at Keeneland only a year ago that I was henceforth going to run the tightest ship in the game. And I have clearly exhausted the patience of some who are in a position to make that tell.

“As a result, anyhow, I have trapped valued clients and friends in a horrible corner. It simply isn't right for anyone to feel like they should even think about passing on the Derby because they feel sorry for someone who has already won it seven times. Okay, maybe six times. We'll see. But I am going to get these horses on the trail as best I can and, if nothing relieves the stalemate by the time we get to those 100-40-20 trials, then I am going to insist, really insist, that they be transferred to a trainer who can bank those points.

“I know a lot can go wrong with all these horses in the meantime, so I am going to use all my skill to keep them in the game. But then they are going on loan to Todd or whoever. Because that is the only way I can serve the shared interests of these horses; my friends who own them; and the sport I love. Someday I'll be back at Churchill. In the meantime, this is one way I can show that I can see the bigger picture; that I will deserve to be welcomed back.”

Corniche, another 'TDN Rising Star', took the Breeders' Cup Juvenile | Horsephotos

For the guys who own Corniche, after all, it's hardly as though we're talking about Clement L. Hirsch and Warren Stute, whose 48-year relationship we celebrated earlier this week. And nor is this just about the silks that happen to get paired with that blanket of roses. Think, for instance, what it would mean to Sam-Son Farm for Messier to win the Derby for a family cultivated there through five generations.

To a degree, moreover, we all have a stake in what happens next. Hopefully Baffert noticed the latest manoeuvres of those zealots who really do think of us as “instruments of Satan”, now trying to sever slots payments to the New York industry. Meanwhile we, too, manipulate opportunities of political or legal process–against each other. Some people are harnessing ideological lobbies to defend their constitutional right to pump pharmaceuticals into horses. Others, still more barefaced, dare to apply for Illinois wagering rights as reward for a commitment to local horse racing that feels rather elusive in the bulldozing of those beautiful stands at Arlington.

We all have a responsibility toward the future viability of our sport. Remember, we have a lot of enemies out there. Most are vexingly wrong-headed, but that doesn't mean they won't get a hearing in the social media age. So we had better make sure we reach Louisville next spring ready to correct any misapprehensions that might have flourished during the 51 weeks since Medina Spirit (Protonico) gave his contentious sample. Because they would doubtless be gripped, in Decatur, to read that one (or several) of the most talented colts in the crop is barred from the Derby, and why.

In this particular saga, then, we can't afford for both sides simply to keep entrenching their positions, waiting for the lawyers to lean on their spades. Because that's not going to happen any time soon. And a messy situation, meanwhile, could become Messier yet.

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