Bob Baffert is back at the Kentucky Derby for the first time in four years, having served his punishment for Medina Spirit's failed drug test and coming to the place where he's won a record-tying six times.
He's settled in at his old Barn 33, the signs boasting of his Churchill Downs triumphs again hanging on the outside wall.
"I'm going to have fun now that everything is behind me," Baffert said in an interview this week.
The white-haired trainer will saddle Wood Memorial winner Rodriguez and Citizen Bull, last year's 2-year-old champion, in the Derby on May 3.
"Going back with a live horse is more important to me," he said. "I really feel like this year I have two horses that could be in the top five, top 10."
Baffert spent the last three years away from the race he values most, relegated to watching on television with family and friends. Taking away some of the sting was the knowledge that he didn't have a horse he believed could have won it those years.
"The Derby is a great experience if you have a horse that's capable and has a chance," he said.
He thought he had that horse in 2021, with Medina Spirit crossing the finish line first to give Baffert a record-breaking seventh Derby victory.
Until a failed drug test ultimately disqualified the colt — just the second in Derby history to be DQ'd for that reason — and tarnished the reputation of a trainer known as the face of horse racing, having won the Triple Crown in 2015 and 2018.
Baffert initially was suspended two years in June 2021 for Medina Spirit testing positive for betamethasone, a steroid which is legal as a therapeutic in Kentucky but not allowed in a horse's system on race day.
"We never denied the positive," he said. "We knew we had the positive."
Baffert said he and his lawyers attempted to explain that Medina Spirit had been treated with a topical ointment containing the steroid for a skin inflammation.
His biggest regret?
"I wish I would have known about the (steroid) having the betamethasone," he said. "In hindsight we would have left it (in California). Then we wouldn't have had this issue.
"But at the end of the day, it still can't be in his system and that was the problem."
The Louisville track tacked on an extra year to his suspension in July 2023 after continuous legal appeals by Baffert about the failed test. In January 2024, he dropped the appeal related to Medina Spirit's DQ. The colt had died following a workout in late 2021.
