From Star to Scandal: the Story of Medina Spirit

Brenda Elsey brings you a special Burn It All Down episode. Horseracing is undergoing exceptional drama this year sparked by Kentucky Derby star and scandal Medina Spirit and his trainer Bob Baffert. Brenda interviews three experts in the horse racing world: Joe Drape, New York Times reporter, Dr. Megan Kerford, racetrack veterinarian, and Dr. Katherine Mooney, associate professor at Florida state and author of "Race Horse Men" to understand the history, the breaking news and the future of the sport.

This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Music in this episode is by Ketsa. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.

Transcript

Brenda: Welcome to Burn It All Down. It's the feminist sports podcast you need. I'm co-host Brenda Elsey, and while we're still on vacation for June I get to step in this week and do a little special mini episode. We will be back real soon in July with regularly scheduled content.

When the Kentucky Derby doping scandal involving winner Medina Spirit and his trainer Bob Baffert erupted in May, like a lot of people, I didn't really understand what on earth was happening. So I talked to three experts in the horse racing world and an entire universe unfolded that I never knew existed. So, buckle up flamethrowers, for a story about sex, drugs, and hay. Medina Spirit, a thoroughbred full, was born on April 5th, 2018 to Protonico and Mongolian Changa in Ocala, Florida.

[audio of foal neighing] 

Medina Spirit boasts a decent pedigree, including Secretariat, who still holds the fastest Kentucky Derby time from 1973. But Medina Spirit’s parents hadn’t performed up to expectations and he simply didn’t look like a winner. At auction, he fetched a mere $1000, which is chump change in horse racing. Top yearlings can sell well into the millions. A year in, Medina Spirit started to show potential, what trainers call precocity – competitiveness and speed – and became a good fit to help his cohort train. Word spread about the colt and Saudi venture capitalist Amr Zedan snatched him up for $35,000. Two years old thoroughbred prices range widely, topping out at $16 million, but by all accounts $35000 is well below the average. Here’s Amr Zedan on Dubai racing. 

Amr Zedan: He showed a science of ability all the way when we picked him up for sale. If you really take a deep dive and say sporadically it's experience distance. 

Brenda: The dark bay colt is named after Zedan's home city of Medina, one of the holiest sites in Islam, and the horse’s grandmother, Alpha Spirit – quite a divine name.

Amr Zedan: He showed a heart that is bigger than itself. He just refuses for anyone to pass him.

Brenda: Zedan then sent Medina Spirit along with his first string horses to legendary trainer, Bob Baffert.

Amr Zedan: And if there's one thing to say about Bob Baffert, he's an artist. He is someone that just felt it.

Brenda: Under Baffert, Medina Spirit just kept outrunning his better bread competitors, and he qualified for the Kentucky Derby because of the points he earned in lead up races. Still, Medina Spirit was maybe Baffert’s number four or five horse. Then…

News host: Today news broke that one of the top Kentucky Derby contenders, Life Is Good, undefeated for hall of famer Bob Baffert, announced he is off the Derby trail.

Brenda: The undefeated Life Is Good, who was poised to win the triple crown, was sidelined by an injury just before the Kentucky Derby. 

News host: As much as we talk about Kentucky Derby, when we talk about Bob, how deep is his bent still, even without Life Is Good? 

Brenda: This was Medina Spirit’s chance to take the Derby. A first place prize of $1.86 million.

News host: Bob Baffert will be in Kentucky for the Kentucky Derby this year. It's a question of what's his biggest bullet.

Brenda: Still, the experts didn't focus on Medina Spirit, even as a dark horse contender. On May first at Churchill Downs racetrack in Louisville…

Commentator: Nineteen three-year-olds, all in line, and ready for the start. [starting bell rings] They’re off, in the Kentucky Derby!

Brenda: A 12-1 odds unfavorite, Medina Spirit’s win was truly a Cinderella story.

Commentator: …Come in to the final furlong. Mandaloun, fighting for the front! Medina Spirit battles on. Hot Rod Charlie on the outside. Essential Quality on the far outside. All four of them heading to finish in the Kentucky Derby! Here’s the wire! Bob Baffert does it again! Mendina Spirit has won the Kentucky Derby! Mandaloun was second, Hot Rod Charlie…

Interviewer: What does it mean to set the record now, Bob? This is the seventh time, nobody's ever won this many.

Bob Baffert: I just can't believe it. It hasn’t sunk in yet.

Brenda: The horse racing community blew up with analysis and speculation following the Derby.

TV host: But the funny thing is, I suppose, going into the race, hardly anyone was talking about your colt.

Brenda: Bloggers wondered, maybe it was the brilliance of John Velazquez, the Puerto Rican jockey that many consider among the all-time greats.

John Velazquez: I do it for us in Puerto Rico. It's one of the best ever.

Brenda: Or was it just the Bob Baffert touch?

TV host: Well, it goes to show, if you overlook a horse in the Kentucky Derby that is trained by hall of famer Bob Baffert, there's a good chance he'll make you look foolish. 

Brenda: How had so many who knew so much about horse racing ignored Medina Spirit?

Commentator: That little horse, he won today. I mean, he doesn't know how much he costs, but you know what, what a little race horse. He was all race horse today.

Brenda: But the Cinderella story took a tumble when Medina Spirit failed a post-Derby drug test for steroid use.

News hosts: Happening right now…Drug tests that Medina Spirit failed after winning the Kentucky Derby….The horse tested positive for a banned steroid after winning the Derby…The horse was busted for doping…Betamethasone, an anti-inflammatory, which is prohibited on race days at Churchill Downs…

Brenda: After a second sample came back positive for betamethasone, which is prohibited at any level on race day in Kentucky, Maryland, and New York, the sanctions, the lawsuits and recriminations began. 

Joe: The horse, all he did was run fast. He did what he was supposed to do, okay?

Brenda: That's Joe Drape, an expert on horse racing, who covers the sport for the New York Times and has written multiple books on the sports history. 

Joe: You know, you can't really discount his achievement, but the humans around him failed him. And if it was an accidental dosage, that doesn't matter – the rules are the rules. If they did something intentionally, that's terrible.

Brenda: From a medical perspective on betamethasone, I spoke with Dr. Megan Kerford, a racetrack veterinarian who specializes in horse sport injuries.

Megan: Sometimes with race horses, just like human athletes – pro football players are a good example – they get wear and tear in their joints and they get arthritis. And so then we inject the joint. So, commonly in horses we use betamethasone. It has a very strict 14 day withdrawal –

Brenda: Which means it takes 14 days to exit the horses system. 

Megan: – and in Bob Baffert’s case they were using a topical ointment with betamethasone in it, and the withdrawal is different for topical versus if you give it intra-articularly, which means in the joint or in the muscle. It's different. It absorbs differently through the skin. So, the amount that the horse had probably did not affect how he ran. Now, the rules clearly state you can have no betamethasone in your system, regardless of how the horse got it in their system. 

Brenda: In horse racing, medications are so harshly regulated, not only to keep the playing field even but to prevent serious injury to horses who really aren't healthy enough to be racing.

Megan: We do not want to mask any pain. So, if a horse is running and they feel pain, we want them to stop before they have what we call a catastrophic injury, which has a breakdown on the racetrack. Like, a human will stop, if I'm in a race and I'm like, oh, my knee hurts, I'm going to stop. A horse won’t. They will keep running.

Brenda: Which is why PETA, among others, have blamed doping, even drugs that can't be detected, on keeping horses running even when they shouldn't. So I wondered to myself, has racing always been so grueling for the horse? Had it always been like this?

Katherine: Some listeners may just really be shocked at what the 19th century demanded. 

Brenda: In short, yes. I asked Dr. Katherine Mooney, an associate professor of history at Florida State University and author of Race Horse Men: How Slavery and Freedom Were Made at the Racetrack. How do you compare today's horse racing with the past in terms of the physical demands on the horse? 

Katherine: Well, first of all, they were racing horses older. So, they were more likely to race four and five-year-olds or even six year olds or older, and the highest prestige prizes before say the 1890s were heat racing, where it was best of however many. And the sort of most prestigious races were four mile heat races. Theoretically, your horse could be going 12 miles in one day. So, the differences in what we demand in terms of distance are obviously just like worlds, worlds, worlds apart.

Brenda: Today, the most prestigious events are dash races – one time short sprints. It's why some consider the Kentucky Derby the most exciting two minutes in sports. But according to Dr. Mooney, young horses competing in dash races has its own set of issues.

Katherine: How fast is this horse being asked to go, how was the worst being bred to encourage precocity and also trained and developed to encourage precocity at a very young age so that, you know, the horse may still have physical vulnerabilities and be less able because it's still growing to stay healthy while competing at that speed, even on shorter distances.

Brenda: Another thing that has sort of changed but sort of not in horse racing is who it's for. Horse racing has been the sport of royalty since ancient times. In the US antebellum period, horse racing relied on slave labor. And while that has changed, the sport is still a site of elite elbow rubbing and grossly expensive women's hats. So it shocked some to see Bob Baffert, who seems more like a sunglassed, silver fox mafioso than British royalty, become the winningest trainer in the history of the Kentucky Derby with Medina Spirit’s win. But Medina Spirit’s positive test isn't Baffert’s first doping violation. In fact, Baffert has had five horses test positive for banned substances just this year alone. In the weeks after the Kentucky Derby, Baffert appeared across the news media to defend his multiple violations. And he showed a flair for explaining away his horses’ tests. Here he is on the Dan Patrick Show. 

Bob Baffert: The last couple of years I've had some, like Justify was the big one. He ingested scopolamine, which comes in the hay. I couldn't have prevented that. And we resolved that. It was a bad headline. I had a groom that urinated – he had COVID – and after he was getting over it, he urinated in the stall and the horse ate it. It was a cough medicine. We resolved that. You know, things like that happen because they're testing at these really extremely low levels.

Brenda: Saturday Night Live even did a skit mocking Baffert’s presence.

Michael Che: So Bob, your horse tested positive for steroids, but you deny any involvement? 

Beck Bennett (Bob Baffert): Of course I denied, Michael. Bob Baffert's not stupid. I don't cheat. Do I look like a shady character to you?

Michael Che: Honestly, yes, Bob. Yes you do.

Beck Bennett (Bob Baffert): I think if people got to know him you’d see Medina Spirit’s actually a really cool guy. Normal horse. Check it out. He’s got everything a normal horse has: throbbing muscles, backne, the perfect square Zac Efron jaw, baseball bat shaft, pea sized balls.

Michael Che: You call that a normal horse? 

Beck Bennett (Bob Baffert): Yes, Michael! And here he is on vacation…

Michael Che: Is he at a Mexican pharmacy?

Beck Bennett (Bob Baffert): Oh, so now horse can’t party? Come on, Michael. And here he is hitting his 73rd home run.

Brenda: So, now that we have the tests in, Medina Spirit may have his Kentucky Derby win retracted.

Joe: What has happened here with Medina Spirit is he's now confirmed that the drug tests failed, two of them. They’ll go to a hearing; he's likely to get disqualified. That means Mr. Zedan, the owner, does not get the $1.8 million first place check, nor does Baffert and the jockey get their 10% of that.

Brenda: As far as I understand, a lot of this finance is about recouping losses because these owners don't actually necessarily care most about profits. Is that right?

Joe: Yeah, I got a good anecdote about that. Jerry Moss, who won a Derby with Giacomo and owned probably the greatest race mare of our time, Zenyatta, he started A&M Records, okay? He’s got beautiful things and palaces all over, and he's a really nice down to earth guy, a guy from the Bronx. And he said, “With all my success in the horse race, I've never made a dime in it.” And he says, “Anybody who tells you they're going to make in a horse race, they’re lying to you.” And there's a saying, you know, how do you become a millionaire in horse racing? You start as a billionaire. [Brenda laughs] You know, and I’ve owned horses throughout the years, and it really…All you want to do is get some money back.

It's a lot like gambling. I guess the dream, it's like playing a lottery ticket, is if you can buy, own, breed a Kentucky Derby winner – boom, you know? There’s your 30 million, there's your 60 million. And I think that's the dream that drives guys and women with money. I mean, Trump owned a horse at one point, Steinbrenner owned a bunch. There's sheiks, there's all kinds. And it's their ego, but no matter how successful they were and whatever they did before, they're brought to their knees by horse racing because it's not a game that you can put a system on. I mean, it's nature.

Brenda: And historian Katherine Mooney agreed. More than money is at stake in horse racing, and horses aren’t just horses –

Katherine: – but animal who is understood to represent you is competing, and in that sense I think it's a really powerful way of sort of suggesting, hey, I didn't get to be incredibly, incredibly, incredibly rich and live on fifth avenue because somehow the world isn't fair. I want to be in this position because I actually deserve it, because I'm a winner. Right? And if only you were a winner, you could be in my position too, right? I mean, it’s one of the great sort of displays of ostensible meritocracy in this weird, by proxy way. And that means that the horses themselves come to represent all sorts of things about, you know, their masculinity and their identity and their power and, you know, whatever. And that means that the horses in a weird way end up not as tools but as alter egos.

TV host: But as a winning owner, what was it like?

Brenda: Again, Amr Zedan on Dubai Racing.

Amr Zedan: Well, it was really emotional, to sum it all up. But at the same time, you know, as a parent, and my boys are young, and my daughter, everyone's just so proud of it. It's just a legacy you'd like to leave. You'd like to leave something that's intangible, something that you can’t just acquire.

Brenda: So maybe actually winning races is for the ego and recouping losses from those races is just part of the business which most owners do by breeding. Top studs can make up to $250,000 a breeding session. In other words, to have sexual intercourse with a mare. This can be three times a day and they can be flown all over the world to mate. But to get that kind of clout, it's necessary for the horses to be seen and succeed in major stake races. And that's likely what Medina Spirit will be doing in the near future. On top of the intense breeding and doping, there are other concerns about horse racing that have surfaced over the past few years. There have been a spate of catastrophic accidents, and maybe most puzzling and striking was during the 2019 winter-spring meeting where 30 horses died at Santa Anita, a prominent racing track.

News hosts: Another horse has died at the Santa Anita racetrack in Southern California…The dying at racetracks is not uncommon…A four year old colt has died while training at Santa Anita racetrack today…30th horse death yesterday here at the park…

Brenda: Just this summer, Santa Anita has had three fatalities, including a horse named Pushing Sixty. The chestnut filly was exiting a far turn when it fractured her left front ankle. The injury was considered too severe for recovery and Pushing Sixty was euthanized. That was the 11th racing or training death at Santa Anita since the meeting started in December, 2020. So I wondered to myself, could the sport even survive these tragic accidents and these scandals? I mean, I hear more about the scandals and problems in horse racing at this point than about horse racing itself. Well, Congress is actually trying to help. At the end of 2020, Congress passed and the president signed the horse racing integrity and safety act. It's actually a piece of cross-party legislation that is supposed to take effect on July 1st, 2022.

The act demands standards and conditions for thoroughbred racing because of the tragedies, also to make uniform the medication rules and regulations, because currently the rules on substances are set at the state level – which to describe as chaotic would be a gross understatement. Regardless of Congress's actions, it’s the stakeholders that may in fact force reform. And by stakeholders, I mean the original source of the term: the gamblers. A group of gamblers, or as Joe puts them, horseplayers, Betting Betters, has filed a class action lawsuit against Baffert.

Joe: Horseplayers, which I count myself among, are a cranky, erudite bunch. And you know, it's not just about the money, it's about being right. And if you're right, you get rewarded. So, for those of us who bet on Mandaloun, the second place horse, and several million dollars worth of it, we don't get our money back. Medina Spirit has been paid, and that money has already been spent, likely, by various betters on that. So, a group came together and sued both him, Baffert the owner, and in another case Churchill Downs for the money they lost.

Brenda: Given everything that has occurred, you might think our experts would feel conflicted and concerned about the continuation of the sport itself. And you’d be right. Here’s Katherine Mooney.

Katherine: I have very mixed feelings. Speaking as a historian, I would say that our understanding of animals as, you know, to be cherished and to be sort of cosseted that way and not to be work animals, is such a relatively new idea that to historicize it is probably helpful. But also, I would say as somebody who has spent a lot of time very happily with performance horses were very well taken care of, I know plenty of horses who've loved to compete, who were just like, “I'm gonna show you something! Yeah, you’re gonna really like this.” And I don't want them to lose that. But that doesn't mean that I don't sympathize with what I think is the very sincere desire to protect those animals. And that has to be at the core of everything we do. 

Brenda: Veterinarian Dr. Megan Kerford emphasized that scandal is not the defining feature of the sport.

Megan: I honestly think we're heading in the right direction. Like, it's really been cleaned up, and I just hope that what's happened recently doesn't taint…I hope the actions of one person doesn't taint the view of all the wonderful people in the horse industry that are following the rules and are trying to do everything correct and love their animals.

Brenda: And for Joe Drape, the future of horse racing is that a pivotal moment.

Joe: I like it sort of as a fan. I started following horse racing long before I ever became a reporter. I grew up going to the tracks. I've been to 140 of them in like 12 countries. I don't want it to go away, but it can't sustain this level of corruption. I mean, we didn't even mention the 27 trainers and vets who got indicted for doping horses in the beginning of 2020 and are going through the federal system right now. So, I hope this is the final wake up call, and it can't sustain this way, but we'll see.

Katherine: A horse should have an innate dignity and an innate right to safety, and to…I mean, I don't know if it sounds overly sentimental, but to happiness or contentment.

Brenda: Horses captivate people. Artists see them as challenges, authors like William Faulkner tested human nature in their relationships to the animal, and the ancients made them into demi gods. Our language is littered with euphemisms. We use horsepower. We get charley horses. We hope to hear things straight from their mouths. As for Medina Spirit, his urine samples are criss-crossing the country, literally on planes, traveling to testing labs as part of the legal wranglings, which are sure to go on for months if not years. But it's nice to think that he's oblivious to it all.

This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg, our web editor is Shelby Weldon, and music is by Kesta.