The Greatest of All Time - Bob Baffert
 

Ah more historical perspective LOST

HARDLY...when you get the BEST horses (like the Jones's did at Calumet or Woody got for years) of course you will do well.

Bedwell, Sheppard, Laz, Shug, Frankle, Aidan O’Brien, Fitzsimmons, Whittingham, Jerkins, Max Hirsch

The guy just won the Derby with a modestly bred, very low priced colt. Sure, he gets great horses, but he's done great work with others too. Real Quiet comes to mind right away.

The only real knock against Baffert is he hasn't had a real grass star. Even Wayne Lukas eventually demonstrated he could train top grass horses.

But for racing on dirt- yeah, he's the GOAT. And it's not just the TC success with royally bred horses. He has had success with modestly bred horses, he can manage a horse over a long career (see Game on Dude), etc.

Obviously he is talented, but he is entering 2-3 horses against each other in races like the Kentucky Derby and seems to have a horse in almost every big stakes race. Of course he's going to have more wins than others will. This is on top of having access to many of the top horses, which furthers his chances of getting wins.

Why not compare him to Pletcher then?

There you go with those facts again, cj. :);)

And he has the horses to enter because he is so good. If he hadn't demonstrated his ability to train he simply wouldn't have the horses. To knock him for entering many horses is brushing aside the reason he has the horses to enter!

True about the grass with Baffert, but I think that is entirely attributable to his focus on the big dirt races. I am not aware that he ever made any serious attempts at obtaining grass runners for his stable.

Also looks like he has a pretty good one in Du Jour, 3yo that won a stakes on Derby day.

A colt won that race not a human

Dick post...just sayin'

Owners win races, jockeys win races, trainers win races, horses win races, even breeders win races. They are all a team (save maybe breeders in most cases). No horse wins alone just like no human wins without the horse.

So yea, dick post.

It will be fun to see what he can do with him.

You did spell eight of their names correctly, so there's that.

Baffert's success is extraordinary but keep in mind, he is the sport's worse offender in terms of total drug violations and drug violations per start, and, a few years ago, 7 of his horses dropped dead in a 16 month period, all from heart failure. He's the only trainer in the Hall of Fame with such a dreadful record of dead horses and drug violations.

One thing to remember about PED's is that we don't know what people did decades ago. We see this in baseball too- everyone condemns Barry Bonds but most probably, the great players of decades ago used greenies.

It's amazing no one talks about all of the positives his horses have had.

But they wanted to crucify Doug O'Neil for his, when he hit the limelight.

Some NFL teams look like they're on greenies or some sort of speed when the game starts. When the Seattle Seahawks had that great defense, they were so fast in the first quarter that it looked suspicious.

But, there's a huge difference between something like a "greenie" and steroids and other PED's.

It's obvious the way Baffert's horses run (fast early, don't get tired in the stretch the way other trainer's horses do) that something is being applied artificially. But, there are still a lot of gullible people who think his success is due to his training ability. There will always be people that fall for this. Yeah, and Lance Armstrong won 7 straight Tour De France's because he was better than everyone else.

I remember how so many baseball writers embarrassed themselves with their coverage of Mark McGwire. You had to be a complete idiot to think that he wasn't using steroids, yet long-time baseball writers were writing shit like "McGwire started a new workout program and bulked up during the off-season and boy is it paying off!"

Could it be this?

Secretariat with his oversized heart* was a freak of nature. I was looking for a reason how a few current trainers seem to get their non-freaky horses to run without backing up, i.e., run all day long like Secretariat but just at a lower speed.

These articles may have been posted here before but I couldn't find them.

https://www.paulickreport.com/news/r...doping-threat/
“It is, I would say, just about epidemic use in our industry,” he (Sams) said in an Oct. 2, 2018, meeting of the KEDRC. “Some trainers, I'm not going to mention any names, their horses are just rebreaking at the eighth pole."
...
“Biological passports have been used very successfully in human testing to detect EPO,” said Sams. “It does not work in horses for a number of reasons, one of which is the ability of the horse to store red blood cells in the spleen and the ability to then release them. We don't see a lot of stability in hematocrit and hemoglobin because the horse can release those red blood cells when it's being handled before the blood sample is collected.”

https://www.paulickreport.com/news/t...rdbred-horses/
“Unfortunately IOX-2 is just one doping agent and we are not naive to believe that others are not finding their way into professional sport. Whether it be a racing lab or a WADA lab, we share a common mission and can never let our guard down. Today, it's IOX-2, tomorrow it's going to be something else,” said Ed Martin, ARCI President.

----------------------------

* oversized heart
https://issuu.com/equestriandirector...020/s/10168613

One thing to remember is that the "oversized heart" story of Secretariat is racing's ultimate fish tale. Secretariat's heart WAS oversized- an x-ray showed it to be about 14 lbs., and this was reported during his racing career.

When he died, his necropsist claimed his heart was 22 pounds, but took no pictures and didn't save the heart. (When Phar Lap turned out to have a large heart in his autopsy, they saved it and documented it.) The same doctor claimed Sham's heart was 18 pounds, which is preposterous.

At any rate, back to Baffert. I assume he cheats. I also assume the greats of the past cheated too.

Somehow I believe the necropsist in the story more than the undocumented 14 lbs in an x-ray. And Sham's heart?
At the necropsy, his heart weighed in at 18 pounds (8.2 kg), about twice the size of the average thoroughbred heart. He is buried at Walmac Farm.[7].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sham_(...0Walmac%20Farm.

That's really the crux of it, "freaks". Yes, assuming that Secretariat was not on steroids or other PED's, he certainly was a freak. He looked like a freak and I doubt very much that he was juiced. But freaks are few and far between. There has really only been one baseball player, Ruth, who was a freak. He hit more home runs in one season than all of the other players in his league combined! Ruth is still the only player in baseball history who hit 60 home runs in an 154 game season (Maris had 59). What this means is that it's virutally impossible to hit 60 home runs in 154 games, since only one man has ever done it. So once it suddenly became easy, you knew it was drugs. There aren't that many freaks, and that's why there's no doubt that Baffert juices his horses.

I have a very important question.

WHY?

Steroids were well established by the time of Big Red. They had already been in the Olympics for TWENTY YEARS (1954 was when Russian weightlifters were first juicing).

It would be far more surprising to me to find out definitively that Secretariat ran CLEAN.

This.

Anything's possible, but his trainer, Lucien Laurin, although quite successful, only had one horse that I can remember that ran insanely fast, Secretariat. Yes, Riva Ridge was also fast, but his wins looked normal. Laurin was successful, not freaky successful the way Baffert is. Baffert has had so many horses that run suspiciously powerful races that it's obvious that he's a cheater. No one is that lucky and no one is that good. You just don't get that many freaks, it's impossible. Of course, the fact that he has more drug violations than any trainer is all the proof you need, plus the 7 horses that dropped dead while basically standing in their stalls.

Pandy...Pandy.....:rolleyes:....Another Baffert hater speaks....Simply asinine.

Baffert won the Derby with Silver Charm (1997), Real Quiet (1998), War Emblem (2002), Triple Crown winner American Pharoah (2015), Triple Crown winner Justify (2018), and Authentic (2020).

Go ahead and break it down for us how each was juiced or on steroids or whatever trickery was used....:popcorn:

So you think Baffert has nothing to answer for?

He's just a misunderstood hay and oats guy?

Careful how you answer:

He's, by default, the face of horse racing and yet we hear these baseless attacks every time Baffert wins....Did they say this about Woody Stephens Belmont winners?

Horse racing doesn't need this bullshit....Enough already.

Rumors are a buzzing...I told you to be careful...

Dogecoin Pump and Dump is More Interesting
 

Will rumor be enough for it to suddenly be in Mandaloun's best interest to run off "only" 2 weeks rest in the Preakness?

Maybe they're coming back to Louisville to announce a Bob Baffert Statue for Churchill Downs? :popcorn:

Sullivan is a reporter at Louisville, KYcourier-journal.com