Book Review: Death Of A Racehorse

[Wandering Eyes]

The name of the book recently released by Simon & Schuster is “Death of a Racehorse,” which might lead one to believe that author and CNN Reporter Katie Bo Lillis is the latest to jump on the anti-racing bandwagon. That is not the case. This is a book that truly can't be judged by its macabre cover or title.

It's not that Lillis is a cheerleader for racing. A graduate of the Godolphin Flying Start program, she clearly understands the sport and seems pained by what ails it–breakdowns, overuse of therapeutic medications, trainers who dope their horses, ineffective racing commissions, and owners who don't care enough about their horses to make sure they go to a good and safe home after they are done racing.

But there's very little saber-rattling in “Death of a Racehorse”. Lillis sticks to the facts and doesn't seem to have an agenda, simply spelling out what's wrong with the sport. That was the result of what had to be hundreds of hours spent writing, researching and talking to key figures in the industry–Bob Baffert and Stuart Janney III among them.

The book revolves around the two big scandals that hit racing in close proximity. There was the disqualification of Medina Spirit (Protonico) from the 2021 GI Kentucky Derby for a Betamethasone positive that led to Baffert's three-year ban from Churchill Downs. The other is the arrests made by the FBI in 2020 after it caught dozens of individuals on wiretaps admitting they were using performance-enhancing drugs on their horses. As she did with virtually every subject she covered, she tried to tell both sides of the story. She seems to agree with Baffert's conclusion that he was treated the way he was because he is, at heart, a cowboy from Arizona and the sport's bluebloods didn't like him or the fact that he so often beat them in major races.

“Baffert came to understand that they believed he was cheating,” she wrote. “Not with Lasix, or bute or any of the other legal therapeutics that virtually every trainer in America now used. The suspicion that he was using something else, some illegal secret sauce, trailed Baffert whenever he shipped horses East.”

Some people have suggested that Janney, then the chairman of the Jockey Club, had it out for Baffert and instructed investigators to look into his practices.

“I never had a vendetta against Bob Baffert,” Janney told the author. “I, like a lot of people in the industry, was frustrated that he put himself in a very prominent position in the industry and then behaved in a way that didn't reflect very well on the it.”

Lillis doesn't seem to think that Baffert was a cheater. Rather, she writes he was product of a fouled-up system when it came to dealing with drug issues.

“When you put Baffert's case in that context, he begins to look less like the singular villain of horse racing that he has been painted as and more like just another trainer in a bad system,” Lillis writes.

She goes from there to the Rick Dutrow saga. During the 2008 Triple Crown, Dutrow talked openly about his use of anabolic steroids with his horses, including the Derby and GI Preakness winner Big Brown (Boundary). At the time, such steroids were legal, but it was a subject no one in racing wanted to talk about and Dutrow actually revealed one of racing's dirty little secrets.

“If bettors believed racehorses were being doped until they dropped, they would take their wagering dollars elsewhere,” she wrote. “If the sport wanted to survive, it had to give up the needle.”

Lillis did extensive research into the raids and arrests by the FBI that eventually landed high-profile trainers Jorge Navarro and Jason Servis behind bars. She explains what the role of the 5 Stones Intelligence agency was and how that led to the FBI getting involved. When X Y Jet (Kantharos) returned to Dubai in 2013 for his third crack at winning the GI Dubai Golden Shaheen, Lilis writes that he was “loaded” with drugs and that “unbeknownst to Navarro, the FBI was watching.”

Navarro's drug dealer was the notorious veterinarian Seth Fishman, who was allegedly supplying hundreds of trainers (most of them harness trainers), with a endless supply of PEDs.

X Y Jet died in 2020. Did Navarro kill X Y Jet? Did Fishman? Was his death unrelated to the massive amounts of drugs he had been given throughout his career, something that few believe is possible.

Lillis also reveals that both Saffie Joseph Jr. and Chad Brown were under suspicion by the FBI and 5 Stones. Ultimately, there was not enough evidence to charge either one

Lillis fills up more than 300 pages dissecting many of racing's biggest problems, but she writes that she is optimistic about the sport's future. She cites the creation of HISA as one of the reasons why.

“I am hopeful,” she wrote. “Some horsemen have quietly told me that they have seen attitudes toward the animal begin to shift–perhaps because horsemen have been driven by HISA to be more conservative to avoid regulatory scratches, perhaps because they are facing the prospect of the demise of their way of life, perhaps because the unrelenting national criticism of horse dying on the track has forced a reckoning.”

She says the real change will come when owners and trainers stop thinking of their horses as property whose only purpose is to earn purse money. She writes that she would like more people to see them as pets.

She concludes: “It must be enough to raise and race these beautiful animals, without attention to the return on investment. If you want only to maximize the value of a potential stallion or bolster the price of your yearling at auction or eke “just one more race” out of a tired claimer, then you shouldn't do it.”

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