Case Against Baffert Dismissed

The California Horse Racing Board’s case against trainer Bob Baffert, one of whose horses tested positive for morphine after a race at Hollywood Park last year, was dismissed Monday by a federal judge in Los Angeles.

Judge Dickran Tevrizian ruled that Baffert, the country’s leading trainer in purses since 1998, had been denied due process when Truesdail Laboratories, the state’s testing facility, destroyed the horse’s blood sample before it could be tested.

The horse--Nautical Look, winner of a $58,650 race on May 3, 2000--had twice tested positive for morphine when her urine sample was analyzed.

Facing a 60-day suspension that was to have begun in June, Baffert appealed the penalty and professed innocence.

Reached Monday for a reaction, Baffert was happy but still concerned about the state’s zero-tolerance rule for prohibited medications. His attorney, Neil Papiano, had argued that the amount of morphine in Nautical Look’s system was thousands of times smaller than just one grain of sugar.

“I was completely innocent, but what happened still leaves a cloud of suspicion over me,” Baffert said. “What bothers me is that something like this could still happen again, unless they change the levels they’re testing for.”

A spokesman for the racing board said that Roy Wood, the board’s executive director, could not comment on the case without having seen the judge’s full ruling.

“This was all a very ugly deal,” Baffert said. “It’s not a very good system, and what cases like this do is reflect poorly on racing. I would have appealed the suspension if it had been one day or 60 days, because I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. The racing board was out to railroad me from the start. It all could have been nipped in the bud, but the racing board was determined to nail me.”

Truesdail, in Tustin, had been instructed by the racing board, in a cost-cutting measure, to destroy one-third of the blood samples on file.

Morphine, which can be a powerful stimulant when ingested by a horse, was found in the post-race urine samples of three other horses that ran later last year. Two of the horses were trained by Bobby Frankel, a member of the Racing Hall of Fame. The other horse was trained by Jesus Mendoza.

Frankel’s hearing before state stewards is scheduled for February; the stewards are withholding a ruling in the Mendoza case pending submission of written closing arguments.