More Baffert
I've noticed that there are still some people who say things like, "Well, Baffert gives them legal drugs and just has small overages."
Like it's no big deal and like he hasn't had an alarming amount of horses that he trained drop dead.
Here's part of an article that appeared in the Louisville Courier Journal.
The Bob Baffert story: Triple Crown trainer racks up wins — and excuses for dirty drug tests
By Andrew Wolfson - Louisville Courier Journal
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The year was 1976, and fledgling trainer Bob Baffert was desperate.
"I couldn’t win a race, and I wanted to win so badly before the meet ended," he wrote years later in his autobiography, "Dirt Road to the Derby."
So he let a virtual stranger give his horse a painkiller.
"I didn’t know what it was, and I barely knew the guy,” Baffert said in his book.
The drug turned out to be morphine, and the horse lost anyway. California regulators suspended Baffert for a year.
But he managed to flout the sanction: Each day, he would sneak into the backside at Los Alamitos Race Track in his father’s horse trailer and prep his dad’s horses in the privacy of his barn.
Fast forward 15 years.
In 1991, Baffert was slapped with another suspension, this one for two weeks, for giving the medication Robinul to a $32,000 claimer to clear the horse's mucous. His lawyer advised the sanction wasn’t worth fighting, that Baffert should just take a vacation to Hawaii, which he did.
"I vowed right then and there I would never help one of these horses like that again," he wrote in the book, co-authored by turf writer Steve Haskin. "I told the investigators, ‘Boys, that's the last shot you will ever get at me.'"
But the next year, he gave the very same drug and Lasix, a diuretic, to Thirty Slews, a bad bleeder who won the Breeders’ Cup Sprint a few days later at Florida’s Gulfstream Park.
Baffert said he met an assistant named "Jake" at 4 a.m., when there would be no veterinarians around. While Baffert mixed the solution, Jake pretended to read the warning label on the bottle.
"Side effects may cause two weeks in Hawaii," Jake said.
"We just broke up laughing," Baffert recalled in his book.
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