All clear? Not yet for Kentucky Derby, Oaks drug tests

Drug-test results from the Kentucky Derby and Oaks used to be a run-of-the-mill ritual. Usually, an all-clear pronouncement would have been made by now.

Disqualifications in 2020 and 2021 made the process anything but routine. Now federal regulation has changed it even more.

The Kentucky Horse Racing Commission, which posted its annual statements four days after the 2022 Derby and six days after in 2023, deferred Monday to the Horseracing Integrity & Welfare Unit, which said it would announce only failed drug tests if there were any.

“HIWU maintains the same results management and public-disclosure procedures for all races,” spokesperson Alexa Ravit wrote in a text to Horse Racing Nation late Monday afternoon. “These procedures are followed in accordance with (the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority’s) anti-doping and medication-control program rules. As part of these procedures, HIWU does not publicly report negative results. Any adverse analytical findings (positive tests) from the Kentucky Derby or races run on Kentucky Derby weekend would be reported as per the ADMC program’s public-disclosure rules.”

So now no news is good news. Well, maybe.

According to the HIWU rulings web page, the most recent case of a medication violation under investigation happened April 17.

Rather than this being a case of waiting indefinitely for something not to happen, Ravit said the KHRC still could report if all horses not showing up in the HIWU portal had clean post-race tests from the Grade 1 Kentucky Oaks on May 3 and the Kentucky Derby on May 4.

“Since HIWU has a voluntary implementation agreement with the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission,” she wrote, “they will receive all test results and may announce test results at their discretion.”

A question specifically about that part of the HIWU statement had not been answered yet by a KHRC spokesperson, to whom it was sent after business hours Monday.

This year’s Derby was the first to be under federal medication regulations that went into effect May 22, two days after last year’s Preakness Stakes. Those rules had a four-day false start in March 2023 before a federal judge in Texas ordered them to go through a waiting period before they finally took hold. Some state regulators and horsemen’s groups continue to push court cases forward in hopes of having HISA declared unconstitutional.

The post-race results from the Derby and Oaks took on added significance after a pair of Bob Baffert-trained horses were flagged for betamethasone, a drug that is legal to use as long as it does not show up in race-day tests. Gamine lost her third-place result in the 2020 Oaks, and Medina Spirit was disqualified from his win in the 2021 Derby.

Baffert contended the applications of the medication through skin ointment were legal because they came before the two-week withdrawal period recommended by the KHRC. The resulting two-year suspension of Baffert in 2021 by Churchill Downs Inc. was extended indefinitely through at least the end of 2024. Baffert and his client owners lost administrative and courtroom appeals to be reinstated sooner.