Churchill Downs - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Is horse racing worth saving?
The discussion of the future of horse racing seems to be popping up more regularly these days. The greater regularity of the topic probably started in 2019, when Santa Anita Park in Southern California had an unprecedented rash of horses suffering fatal injuries, with 42 horses dying and shutting do...
Quick, what hat says, ‘I’m fun but also grieving 7 dead horses’?
Here at Deadspin, we take a wait-and-see approach to covering horse racing. Every year, someone will pitch a Kentucky Derby preview and either get laughed out of the writer’s room or ignored. The only reason we wrote about the 2022 iteration was because long shot Rich Strike won at 80-1, and his tra...
80-1 shot Rich Strike wins Kentucky Derby
Rich Strike wasn’t in the Kentucky Derby field when head trainer Eric Reid woke up Friday morning. After a late scratch to Ethereal Road, a spot opened up for a 21st horse in the 20-thoroughbred field. And one of the longest shots in the field at 80-1 at post time just won the 148th Kentucky Derby....
IDIOT OF THE YEAR 2021: Cole Beasley, Enes Kanter, Ron DeSantis, and more doofs
Happy holidays, you filthy animals, and welcome to Deadspin’s annual IDIOT OF THE YEAR extravaganza. Within these hallowed slides are 50 of the year’s least bearable dorks, whose transgressions range from “just kinda silly,” to “dangerously stupid,” to “Trevor Bauer.”...
Bob Baffert’s attorney gets eviscerated on CNN
After Kentucky Derby winner* Medina Spirit failed his first drug test, his trainer, Bob Baffert, did the media rounds to blame cancel culture and everybody besides himself for his horse’s unusually high levels of betamethasone....
Bob Baffert inexplicably blames ‘cancel culture’ for horse-doping controversy
Trainer Bob Baffert’s horse, Medina Spirit, who won the Kentucky Derby on May 1, tested positive for a banned substance. Apparently, according to Baffert, this happened because one of the groomers decided to take a piss on the hay in the horse’s stall after taking cough medicine, and the horse consu...
What happens if Medina Spirit is disqualified?
Only one horse has been disqualified for a drug test after winning the Kentucky Derby. That happened in 1968, when Dancer’s Image was DQ’d for testing positive for a banned anti-inflammatory. But Forward Pass, who finished in second was not declared the official winner until 1972....
Bob Baffert cries wolf again
You have to ask if there’s anything left of horse racing to kill. Perhaps it’s entrenched so deeply into irrelevance, outside of four or five days a year, that just about nothing can make it worse. This is an industry basically surviving on the courtesy of state governments, really....
What Are the Odds That 23,000 People Attending a Horse Race Is a Bad Idea?
Churchill Downs announced today that 23,000 people will be able to attend September’s Kentucky Derby in accordance with the track’s health and safety plan....
Horse Racing Is Surprisingly Still Going, But Is This The End?
Recently, a story that made more headlines than normal in the horse racing world was a bettor cashing a 50-cent pick-5 ticket for the cool winnings of $524,966 at Gulfstream Park in Hallandale, Florida. And your reaction was probably no different than most. And it probably was something along the li...
Horse Dies In Infuriatingly Avoidable Accident At Churchill Downs
Unless you reject the idea of horse racing, you have to accept that horses break down and are destroyed. It's an unfortunate part of the sport, and lots could be done to minimize fatalities, but it's always going to happen. At Churchill Downs yesterday, five-year-old mare Never Tell Lynda did not ne...
Images From The 140th Kentucky Derby
[Horses round the first turn during the 140th running of the Kentucky Derby horse race at Churchill Downs on Saturday. AP Photo/Matt Slocum.]...