Is the Kentucky Derby doomed?

Talking horses with Katie Bo Lillis, author of the great new book 'Death of a Racehorse.' Plus: how you can win a free copy of the book. Free!

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There’s something magical, intoxicating and purely American about the Kentucky Derby.

The bright trumpeting call to the post … the springtime linen finery and the feats-of-engineering hats that cost more than six months’ mortgage … the hope that swells and surges as horses round every turn, and the losing tickets that fall like snow at every finish … the mud-spackled debauchery of the infield and the better-dressed debauchery of Millionaire’s Row … it’s all magnificent, the day of a lifetime every year. At the heart of it all are the horses that make this all possible, the thoroughbreds that storm over the furlongs with timeless grace and power. The Derby is glorious, and you owe it to yourself to find your way to Churchill Downs at least once in your life.

And yet there’s a growing sense that the Kentucky Derby — more to the point, horse racing in general — is receding from the pinnacle of American culture, a relic of a bygone age that’s an uneasy fit in this one. Some of the criticisms of horse racing aim at the foundation of the sport, questioning whether a sport ought to be built on the backs of competitors who lack a voice in the matter. (There is no NIL or transfer portal on the horizon for horses.) Other critics target the humans who train and trade in horseflesh, condemning them for killing a once-great sport with a thousand cuts … or needle sticks. Every time the outside world gets a look at horse racing culture, it recoils in shock and horror at what, to the industry, is often standard practice. And every year, with every horse that dies on the track or in training, the question takes on more urgency: How long can this sport survive?

Into this maelstrom steps Katie Bo Lillis, a CNN investigative reporter and — more importantly — a lifelong lover of horse culture. Lillis’ new book is entitled Death of a Racehorse, and it’s a comprehensive and incisive look at the controversies wracking the sport. She begins, however, from a place of love.

“There is no animal more noble, more intelligent, more sensitive, more capacious and giving of himself than the thoroughbred racehorse,” she told me recently. “We have been as a species fascinated by horses since the dawn of time, and yet they remain so foreign to us. They don’t even see the world the same way we do. They see the world in a panorama — the left eye doesn’t see what the right eye sees. Man has spent millennia trying to get inside the mind of a horse and understand him, and that fascinates me.”

Oh, but there’s a whole lot more to racing than simply appreciating the horse, and Lillis embraces it all. “I love the $2 bettor making bad paddock picks on cheap platers at the rail. I love Miller Lights with a slight hangover on a Sunday afternoon at Saratoga the day after a big race. I love playing cheap horses. I love the backstretch. I love being in the barns with people who make their living just putting their hands on a horse every day. It’s a world where Damon Runyon still lives and breathes, and it’s a world that has not been homogenized by Instagram and cell phones and Starbucks. It still has some color, some individuality and realness to it, because the animal itself is real and cannot exist in a phone. You can’t digitize racing. You can’t do it through AI. I love the texture of that world.”

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I led off our conversation with that hot-take question in the headline, and Lillis’ answer should trouble any fan of the sport.

“The Derby would be the last bastion of racing to be in trouble. The Derby remains very popular,” she says. “But I do think the horse racing industry writ large is in quite a lot of trouble. It is facing an existential threat from declining interest.”

More to the point, she notes, even if the Derby is on sound footing, the industry could rot out from underneath it. “There are roughly 30,000 races that are run across the United States,” she says, “and the gambling on those 30,000 races essentially supports the industry to exist for the 365 days a year it has to in order to produce 20 of the most elite horses that are going to go on and run in the Derby.”

After a lifetime of caring for horses, Lillis stepped away from the sport in her mid-twenties, both because she wanted to write, and because the sport itself had drifted away from her ideal image of it. “I started to become uncomfortable with the way the basic commercial nature of the industry was allowed to run amok in ways that came at the expense of the animal or of good horsemanship,” she says. “Which isn’t to say I think there’s anything wrong with making money on horses. But it is to say that I thought the line had been crossed in some places.”

Two enormous scandals brought her back to the track. A massive 2020 FBI investigation into doping rocked the sport and sent a raft of trainers and veterinarians to jail. The next year, famed trainer Bob Baffert won the Kentucky Derby with Medina Spirit — but that win was stripped and Baffert himself banned from the sport for usage of a drug, betamethasone, that’s common but nonetheless can’t be in the horse’s system on race day. The coverage of both events — combined with several recent unexplained outbreaks of horse deaths, including Medina Spirit in 2021 — led Lillis to decide it was time to delve back into the sport.

“I thought the mainstream media was kind of missing the point,” she says, “getting stuff wrong that was unfairly vilifying parts of racing, while, to me, missing the forest for the trees, the places where racing really did need to do better.” And so, like John Wick, she got back into the game, and here we are with Death of a Racehorse. (It’s a daring move — some might even call it a bold venture — to title your book after one of the haunting classics of sports journalism, but Lillis earns the title.)

In her day job, Lillis covers national security issues for CNN, which prepared her well for a dive into the insular world of horse racing. “Getting inside of horse racing is a much harder lockbox than getting inside of like the national security community,” she laughs. “That cuts both ways. A lot of people in racing are not used to dealing with mainstream media attention.”

One figure in horse racing — really, the only figure — who has broken into the broader mainstream is Baffert, the flashy, white-haired trainer who, fairly or unfairly, embodies both the sport’s emphasis on elite style and its win-at-all-costs mentality. Baffert is both focus and source for much of Death of a Racehorse, and Lillis dispels many of the myths and rumors that have welled up around Baffert as many of his horses have died on the track.

“Through the course of my reporting, I talked to not only Bob himself and members of his family and his team, but many people who have worked with him, regulated him investigated him — friends and foes, basically, of Bob Baffert — and nobody could point me to anything that suggest that he did anything with his horses that wasn’t above board,” she says. “There is criticism that he has run a little bit of a loose ship over there when it comes to allowable medications, and that’s resulted in a lot of (test) positives. But the basic picture of Bob that I walked away from the project with was a really good horse trainer who, despite having a record of infractions that is not out of line with some other major horse trainers in the sport, has been treated quite differently because of how high-profile he is.”

That’s a key theme of the book — that while there are dramatic and wrenching breakdowns of horses on the track, during training, even during races, there’s not one evildoer, not one fatal drug, not one overarching rule or custom that leads to so much pain. Instead, it’s so often a series of smaller decisions, corners cut and envelopes pushed, that leads to larger systemic breakdowns. And in a very real way that’s more terrifying, because there’s no one single cause or individual to stamp out and put the sport back on the right path.

Ultimately, Lillis believes that horse racing could — emphasis on could — save itself by a combination of altering perceptions and permitting regulations. “There are so many countless, wonderful horsemen in the industry who have the best interest of the animal at heart, but ultimately, the industry loves to talk about these horses as ‘athletes,’” she says. “I’ve never thought that was an appropriate moniker because the horse doesn’t have agency. He can’t say no. They are livestock. You are making money on these animals. They are a commodity.”

What’s good for an “animal” isn’t necessarily good for an “athlete,” and vice versa, and therein lies the problem. “The industry has to do a better job culturally,” she says, “being a little bit more modest in their ambitions for the horse and to put the animal ahead of the the profit imperatives a bit more frequently than is currently happening.”

For a sport that struggles at the margins, Lillis understands that’s a tough prescription, but a necessary one for the sport to endure. “Given the challenges racing has with its social license to operate, with the public perception that it is ‘bad for horses’ that’s ultimately damaging its revenue basis, those smaller tracks and smaller trainers probably aren’t going to exist in X, Y, Z number of years anyway,” she says. “If the sport wants to survive overall, it’s got to meet the expectations of a broader public.”

Still, Lillis sees reason for hope, on two fronts: generational and regulatory. “My generation of horsemen have somewhat of a different view of the animal than the generation that taught us a very livestock-minded (approach) to these animals,” she says. “I think we take a little bit of a gentler approach, like we think about welfare in a more front-and-center way.”

She also points to the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, created via a federal act in 2020, with a series of small regulatory changes that have added up to significant numbers — like the fact that there’s been a 27 percent drop in fatalities from 2023 to 2024 in states that adhere to the authority.

“There has long been this attitude in racing that ‘breakdowns are awful, but they’re a fact of life, we can’t really do anything about them,’” Lillis says. “What HISA has shown is that something absolutely can be done, and it’s probably an accumulation of small regulatory changes and cultural shifts.”

Several states are still challenging HISA’s authority, and the battle could go all the way to the Supreme Court, but Lillis is optimistic that the gains will show the industry a new way forward.

“I hope the change will come swiftly enough to enable the sport to also do what it needs to do in terms of generating a new generation of fans and gamblers to come spend money, so that the business side is also lifted. If you don’t fix the welfare piece, you’re not going to fix the business piece,” she says. “I don’t know if these changes are going to happen fast enough, but I think they are moving in the right direction, and that makes me hopeful.”

You can pick up a copy of Death of a Racehorse starting Tuesday at all major retailers, including the Flashlight & A Biscuit virtual storefront over at Bookshop:

Or there’s another option …

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Win a free book!

Katie Bo’s book is an exceptional read, and you should buy it yourself. But hey, guess what! Thanks to the fine folks at Simon & Schuster, I have an extra copy of Death of a Racehorse here at Busbee Stables, and it could soon be yours. Enter your name in the first-ever Flashlight & A Biscuit book giveaway lottery, and I’ll select one name at random. Here’s how you enter:

• “Like” this story (tap that heart at the top of the post): 1 entry

• Share this story with friends (use the share button): 1 entry

• Leave a comment about your best and/or worst experience at a horse race: 2 entries

So there you go. You can get a maximum of four entries in our first-ever book giveaway, and entries close at 11:59 p.m. on Friday, May 9. Legalities: No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited. Use only as directed. Do not ingest. My verdict is law. Good luck!

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Song of the Week: “Daddy’s Cup,” Drive-By Truckers

As is our custom around here, we let our guests offer up their selection for our ever-growing playlist. Katie Bo brought some game with her road trip playlist suggestion of the entirety of the Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera. As for a single song, she rides with “Daddy’s Cup,” a ramshackle stomper about a battered old racer passing on life lessons to his wide-eyed and hungry son. Damn, this is a great song:

“See, it ain't about the money or even being Number One
You gotta know when it's all over, you did the best you coulda done
And knowing that it's in you and you never let it out
Is worse than blowing any engine or any wreck you'll ever have.”

Check out “Daddy’s Cup” and all our other selections at the official Flashlight & A Biscuit playlist:

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Stunt Food of the Week: Cotton Candy Fries

Some stunt foods are the result of mad-scientist wizardry in a Test Kitchen of the Damned; some seem like a concoction you’d use to keep a cranky kid quiet. In the latter category, we bring you Cotton Candy Fries, produced by the Toronto Blue Jays. We don’t have any price info or — God forbid — calorie count on this one, but it sure seems like it delivers on exactly what it promises. I’m not sure I want to know what that blue ketchupy drizzle is, but it sure pops in photos, and that’s the real endgame here.

Look, just because something tastes good on its own doesn’t mean it’ll taste good alongside something else that tastes good. But how the hell are you going to know unless you try it? Let’s take a guess:

Thanks to loyal reader and pal Dan Walsh for the suggestion. If you spot Stunt Food — or, hell, anything else — out in the wild that you think we need to see, email me or message me right here.

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Thanks for hanging this week, my friends! Enjoy the springtime and we’ll catch you right back here in just a bit.

—Jay
Land Cat, Georgia

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This is issue #161 of Flashlight & A Biscuit. Check out all the past issues right here. Feel free to email me with your thoughts, tips and advice. If you’re new around here, jump right to our most-read stories, or check out some of our recent hits:

• Home Turn, our new show for NASCAR Studios, is right here for you to watch:

• Dispatch from Augusta: Azaleas, green jackets, pimento cheese n’ such

• On nostalgia, memories and $12 milkshakes

• The Pollening is upon us, abandon all hope

• Let’s create an open-road playlist

• Our first documentary, on the famous Rama Jama’s diner in Tuscaloosa, Alabama

• What does “Flashlight & A Biscuit” mean, anyway?

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