My name is Bob Baffert, and I will not be silenced, no matter how much my lawyers might like that. One of the horses I train, Medina Spirit, is facing disqualification for what authorities call an “excessive amount of the steroid betamethasone,” and what I call “winning the Kentucky Derby.”
Now some people don’t want Medina Spirit running in the Preakness. As I said on a media tour on Monday, this is “cancel culture.” Laugh all you want. But first they come for my horse, and then they come for your dog. Maybe even your cat. There is no telling with these people. As I said on Fox News on Monday, “We live in a different world now. This America’s different.” Imagine if cancel culture were around 250 years ago. People would yank Paul Revere off his horse so they could test the horse’s urine. We’d all be speaking British right now.
And on the subject of urine: As I said on Monday, one testing problem occurred when a groom took cough medicine and urinated in the stall, and then the horse ate some of the hay. I am not saying that this is what happened to Medina Spirit. I’m just saying that, like any other red-blooded American, I am really sick of the urination police. They can go piss up a rope. Or anywhere else, for all I care. I’m not a hypocrite.
You might ask why a groom would pee on the hay that a thoroughbred horse might eat, instead of in—just to use one example here—a toilet. That’s what the cancel-culture goons want you to ask. Do not let them distract you from the real story here, which is that:
1) I trained Medina Spirit for the Kentucky Derby.
2) Medina Spirit won.
3) Somebody nefariously gave Medina Spirit an excessive amount of the steroid betamethasone.
4) That nefarious somebody was not me, or anybody who works for me, or anybody I have ever employed, befriended, canoodled with or even met.
O.K., Bob, but if the horse had a banned steroid in his system, isn’t that cheating, no matter how it got there?
Let’s try this again!
1) I trained Medina Spirit for the Kentucky Derby.
2) Medina Spirit won, fair and square.
3) Somebody nefariously either gave Medina Spirit an excessive amount of the steroid betamethasone that had no effect on the race, or somebody nefariously put it in his sample afterward.
Some people have pointed out that this was my fifth horse in 13 months to test positive, and that The New York Times reported in 2019 that my horses have failed 29 drug tests in my career. Well, many of those horses won, too. Am I the only one who sees a pattern here?
I admit that by now, I should probably be on the lookout for nefarious people and their nefarious ways. I have been careless, folks. Sometimes I leave the horses alone. When they behave, I have been known to slip them a hundred-dollar bill and tell them to have a night on the town. Once in a while, one of my horses wakes up with a wicked hangover and no recollection of why he is in another horse’s stall. But it’s a free country, right? Live and let live.
I do not give drugs to my horses. Or to anyone. But especially my horses. Cancel culture is coming for me, and it’s following me to Pimlico for the Preakness, but—aha!—the joke is on cancel culture, because now I am not even going to the Preakness. As I said on Monday, I don’t want to be a “distraction.” They can’t cancel me if I’m not there, right?
Medina Spirit will be there, unless the Preakness bans him, at which point I will respect the decision, though you should probably keep an eye out for his twin, Medena Spear-It, whom I also train. One way or the other, I hope to win the Preakness from a distance. As I said after Medina Spirit won the Kentucky Derby, “I’m the luckiest guy in the world.” Take that as you will.
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