As Kentucky Derby Nears, Last Year’s Deaths Cast Long Shadow

She acknowledges there are limits to HISA’s authority, which covers horses that have recorded a timed workout at the racetrack. Breeding and sales remain largely unregulated, and practices like repeated breeding of unsound horses, corrective surgeries and drug use are believed to be widespread.

Mr. Baffert’s horses have won the Derby six times, and he has been named champion trainer four times. He is third on the career earnings list with more than $355 million in purses. Mr. Baffert also has a lengthy record of rule violations. According to regulators’ records, horses trained by him have failed 30 drug tests over four decades — most nota... See more

Data from high-tech motion sensors will monitor horses, and an old-fashioned “bucket brigade” as well as state-of-the-art equipment will be dispatched frequently to pick rocks from the racetrack that authorities determined could have played a part in last year’s cluster of deaths.

The Times found that reckless breeding and doping practices, compromised veterinarians and trainers, and decades-long resistance to changes that could save horses lives have placed a multibillion-dollar ecosystem in peril and put the social acceptability of one of America’s oldest sports at risk.

Last year, beneath Churchill Downs’s iconic twin spires, seven horses died during the week of the showpiece event — two of them in races in the hours leading up to the Derby. In the days after, five more sustained fatal injuries, prompting Churchill officials to move their races to another Kentucky racetrack.

It got worse. A colt trained by the spor... See more