Judge orders DQ of Justify from 2018 Santa Anita Derby win

Connections who felt they were wronged by the California Horse Racing Board said they won a “significant legal victory” Friday when a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ordered stewards to disqualify Triple Crown champion Justify from his win in the 2018 running of the Grade 1 Santa Anita Derby.

Mick Ruis, the owner-trainer of runner-up Bolt d’Oro, went to court after it was revealed the CHRB would not demote Justify despite a positive drug test for scopolamine. Bob Baffert, who trained Justify, blamed the test result on a batch of feed that was tainted with jimsonweed and fed to a number of horses at Santa Anita.

Judge Mitchell Beckloff said the CHRB was wrong in the way it agreed with Baffert.

“As the stewards have already determined what the result would be if they could reach the issue of disqualification on the evidence before them, the court will issue a writ directing the stewards to set aside their Dec. 9, 2020, decision and remand decision (not to send the case back to stewards) and to make a new order disqualifying Justify,” judge Mitchell Beckloff wrote in his ruling. “Based on the twice-stated clear position of the stewards, the court finds there is ‘no reason for remand’ (sending back) of the matter as there is ‘no real doubt’ the stewards would have disqualified Justify if they understood that (the CHRB) provided them with such authority when (the CHRB) filed the complaint against the Justify parties.”

Since the CHRB could ask California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal to set aside the ruling, it was not immediately clear if and when steps would be taken to formally change the result of the race. The board’s spokesperson Mike Marten said Friday afternoon that the “CHRB won’t be commenting on pending litigation.”

One attorney for Ruis said it was noteworthy that Beckloff did not order the CHRB to restart the Justify case from some earlier point in what has been a more than five-year process.

“The judge did not remand it to the CHRB for a new hearing,” Darrell Vienna told Horse Racing Nation. “The new hearing isn’t really needed, because all the facts were contained in the stewards’ (October 2020) hearing. They, in fact, had already said that if they could have disqualified Justify, they would have. The judge is basically saying their error was thinking they couldn’t.”

It was nearly two years ago when the CHRB had its closed-door meeting and decided to leave Justify the winner of the Santa Anita Derby. That was two years after the CHRB agreed with Baffert and two of its senior officers that the positive test was caused by tainted feed. In between, The New York Times broke the story that shed the first public light on the scopolamine positive.

The CHRB also decided in the fall of 2020 that scopolamine did not rise to the level of a drug that required disqualification.

Although Ruis settled one lawsuit against the CHRB, Vienna said he has a separate action that hinged on Friday’s ruling. The goal of that suit is to recover money that goes beyond the $400,000 difference between finishing first and second in the Santa Anita Derby.

“Those losses could be attributable to the awarding of a Grade 1 that went to Bolt d’Oro,” said Vienna, who said the horse’s stud fee that is rising from $35,000 this year to $60,000 next year could gone been even higher. “They’re breeding to upwards of let’s say 100 mares. Think about that for maybe 10 years. This could be in the millions and millions of dollars.”

If the result of the Santa Anita Derby were to be changed and Justify dropped to last place, it could create a domino effect on the 2018 season. Justify then would lose the points he needed to qualify for the Kentucky Derby, the first jewel of his Triple Crown. Whether he could be disqualified as the Derby winner would come into question.

Baffert did not respond to a request for his comment on the ruling. His attorney Clark Brewster said Baffert was not a party in Ruis’s lawsuit, so he was not directly involved.