LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – Attorneys for Medina Spirit’s owner, Amr Zedan, and trainer Bob Baffert, have filed a scathing response to the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission report filed in Franklin Circuit Court earlier this week complaining about a New York lab’s handling of a split urine sample for the Kentucky Derby winner.
“The KHRC’s [report] is a complete waste of judicial resources and full of rhetoric that is false (or misleading at best), inflammatory and irrelevant,” the response from Baffert’s attorney, Craig Robertson, and Zedan Stables’ attorney Clark Brewster, reads. “If the KHRC was at all interested in getting to the truth of this matter and following the science – wherever that may lead – its latest pleading would never have been filed.”
The response lays out what likely is the foundation of the Medina Spirit defense. The colt was found to have had betamethasone in its post-Derby bloodwork. The drug is banned on race day in Kentucky. But attorneys for the owner and trainer argue that there is a clear difference between the injectable form of the drug (betamethasone acetate) and the topical form (betamethasone valerate).
While state racing regulations bar the drug on race day, its guidelines for withdrawing treatment deal only with injections. Attorneys for the owner and trainer of Medina Spirit argue that "Betamethasone acetate is regulated by KHRC, however, betamethasone is not."
KHRC regulations do allow for the use of topical corticosteroids, but the state’s schedule of medications doesn’t differentiate between types of betamethasone.
Robertson and Brewster further assert that they were careful to have no communications with the New York lab in question, so as to avoid any allegation that they were involved in trying to influence the result.
And they allege that KHRC has "fueled" a public narrative "that Medina Spirit had been injected with betamethasone. . . . However, that narrative was not true, and the Plaintiffs knew it was not true, because Medina Spirit has never been injected with betamethasone at any point in time."
KHRC regulations require that all parties refrain from public comment about drug testing matters until they are resolved. KHRC officials have repeatedly declined to speak publicly on Medina Spirit’s matter, though statements have been made in court.
The news first broke on the morning of May 9, when Baffert told reporters of the colt’s positive Kentucky Derby test.
Regardless, attorneys for the horse’s connection argued in their filing on Thursday that, “In reality, the KHRC is simply trying to create an issue out of thin air to lay the foundation for eventually questioning the validity of the New York Laboratory’s testing results. The KHRC’s melodramatic motion is based on the fact that it has likely come to the realization that Medina Spirit was not injected with betamethasone, and the positive test was triggered by an ointment, which completely destroys the false narrative that the KHRC has been espousing since the Kentucky Derby. It is clear that the KHRC is strategically attempting to manufacture feigned outrage over a damaged sample it deems irrelevant to clear the path for its eventual refusal to accept any exculpatory results from the New York Laboratory on the sample that truly matters – the split urine sample. The court should disregard the KHRC’s thinly veiled gamesmanship.”
No results from the testing of Medina Spirit’s second post-Derby urine sample have been made public.
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