BALTIMORE — Two weeks ago, Bob Baffert watched the Kentucky Derby in exile from his California home, and when it came time to head to Baltimore this week, he waited until almost the last possible moment. To some extent, neither Preakness week nor the entire Triple Crown series itself truly begins until the guy with the snow-white hair shows up. And this year, that occasion didn’t arrive until Friday morning, the day before the 149th running of the Preakness Stakes.
There are times when Baffert, 71, seems bigger than the entire sport of horse racing, as upon his buzzy arrival at Pimlico Race Course on Friday, when all the prerace oxygen, not to mention every television camera on the premises, was sucked into his orbit. Come Saturday, he will be saddling Imagination, a relatively unremarkable 3-year-old who probably will be a decided underdog to Kentucky Derby champion Mystik Dan when the race goes off at 6:50 p.m. Eastern.
“He’s going to have to step it up,” Baffert said of Imagination, who has two victories in six career starts, the most impressive of the two coming in the Grade 2 San Felipe Stakes. Another Baffert trainee, Muth, was installed as the morning-line favorite Monday but was scratched from the race Tuesday after spiking a fever. “I’m hoping this will be [Imagination’s] coming-out-party race.”
Baffert had the same overshadowing presence at Pimlico a year ago, when the Hall of Fame trainer claimed his record eighth Preakness victory with National Treasure on the same day another of his horses, Havnameltdown, broke down during an earlier race and was euthanized on the track — a day that all at once confirmed Baffert’s public image as both the sport’s most decorated trainer and its most villainous.
But at a time when horse racing is hellbent on modernizing, with a focus on such things as attracting a wider and younger audience and prioritizing equine health — with Congress forcing the latter by creating the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority in 2020 as a regulator — there are some within the industry who seem determined to prove that no one, not even Baffert, is bigger than the sport.
That’s one way to interpret the staredown between Baffert and Churchill Downs Incorporated over Baffert’s ongoing suspension from that track — best known as the home of the Kentucky Derby — stemming from the 2021 failed drug test of Medina Spirit, the Baffert-trained colt whose apparent victory in that year’s Derby was subsequently nullified. It was a shocking result that, in hindsight, marked the start of an existential crisis for the sport, full of tragedy and controversy, from which it is only now emerging.
What was initially a two-year suspension of Baffert, for the 2022 and 2023 races, was extended by a year, taking it through this year’s Derby, because, as the track’s owners explained, he was “unwilling to accept responsibility” for his actions. The extension to the ban was upheld despite a late legal challenge.
As Baffert watched from home, Mystik Dan, trained by veteran Kenneth McPeek, prevailed in a thrilling, three-way photo finish, with Churchill Downs reporting a record-setting handle and NBC posting record-setting ratings. The track has said it will “reevaluate [Baffert’s] status” at the end of this year.
“I’m in limbo,” Baffert said Friday about his status at Churchill Downs. “We’re committed to finding an amicable resolution. We haven’t even started the process. Right now, I’m just focused on” the Preakness.
Though he has been combative in the past on the subject of the Churchill Downs suspension, Baffert has been using the same conciliatory language in other interviews this spring, as if someone in his circle advised him to tone it down if he ever hopes to get back to Louisville. In the meantime, his fellow trainers have taken up the cause on Baffert’s behalf.
“Bob should’ve been at the Derby. Bob is the face of the Kentucky Derby in this decade,” said D. Wayne Lukas, the 88-year-old Hall of Famer, whose decades-long rivalry with Baffert for supremacy in the sport has softened into a mutual respect and even friendship. “That thing got out of hand. It mushroomed on him. I don’t want to get into that. [But] Bob being here is very important. … I wish he would’ve been in the Derby this year, too. Anytime we take somebody that prominent in the Triple Crown series and don’t have him involved, I think it sets us back.”
Late Friday morning, Baffert and Lukas sat in a pair of white folding chairs in Lukas’s customary corner of the Pimlico stakes barn for a long overdue catch-up, one or both of them at various points doubling over in laughter. Lukas’s cane sat propped up against a wall. The first of his six Preakness wins was in 1980, with Codex. On Saturday, he will saddle two contenders, Seize the Grey and Just Steel.
“Wayne is still sharp as a tack,” Baffert said. “Great horseman. He’s going to be tough. You can’t count him out.”
At a combined 159 years old, they are only slightly older than Pimlico itself, which opened in 1870. And if anything, the two old trainers looked downright youthful compared with the crumbling facility, with its chipping paint, rusting gates and walls streaked with mysterious brown swaths. Later this year, a long-expected and much-needed renovation of the track will get underway; among the first steps will be tearing down the Old Grandstand, which has been officially condemned — and thus empty — since 2019.
Next May, the 150th Preakness will again be held at Pimlico, but afterward the central phases of the renovation will launch, forcing a one-year move of the event to Laurel Park for 2026, followed, organizers say, by a return to Pimlico in 2027. Lukas, who would be 91 by that point, vowed to be here when the race returns. Baffert, meanwhile, has said he would never stay in the game as long as Lukas has — a stance precipitated, at least in part, by the 2012 heart attack Baffert suffered while in Dubai for the Dubai World Cup.
From their seats at the corner of the barn, across a dirt pathway lined with media members, the men could see yellow signs dotting a white fence that trumpeted the names of the 13 horses to have won horse racing’s Triple Crown — the last two of which, American Pharoah in 2015 and Justify in 2019, were Baffert’s.
“Every time I come, I see all these signs back here of all these Triple Crown winners,” Baffert said. “I look at these horses, and I go, ‘These horses, what did they have that my other ones didn’t have?’ Then I finally realize: American Pharoah and Justify, they were just superior horses.”
In horse racing, time can seem elastic. The Triple Crown contenders loaded into the starting gates each spring are always 3 years old, but almost everything — and everyone — else seems in need of a serious update, if not a full renovation. Pimlico’s is already on the schedule. The industry, as a whole, is doing its best to move itself forward.
And then there is Baffert. On Friday, he repeatedly insisted he wasn’t ready to look much past the Preakness Stakes the following day. His legacy in large part depends on how his horses perform in these races. But clearly, there is an even larger part of that legacy that will hinge on what Churchill Downs decides to do with him next May.
