By November, Bob Baffert, the sport’s most decorated trainer and in many ways the face of horse racing, issued a public apology and promised to do better following drug tests failed by his horses. Baffert has had 29 tests failed by horses over the past four decades, including four in the past six months. If you don’t have safe and clean sport, you don’t have anything.”Horse racing arrived at this moment because, in 2012, Hancock and his wife, Staci, founded the Water Hay Oats Alliance with the mission of getting drugs out of racing. In 2016, Hancock said McConnell told him that he could not push an earlier version of the bill until Churchill Downs got on board. “We don’t believe a federal bill is practical, reasonable, or imminent,” Bill Carstanjen, chief executive of Churchill Downs, told The New York Times in a statement in 2019.

Source: New York Times December 29, 2020 09:56 UTC