Robert Osbourn and Bob Baffert fan was selling ‘Bring Back Bob’ T-shirts in the neighborhood around Churchill Downs on Saturday before theKentucky Derby. Chuck Culpepper/The Washington Post
LOUISVILLE — To find Bob Baffert during Kentucky Derby weekend, you had to exit the Churchill Downs gates a few paces and happen across the friendly man selling “Bring Back Bob” T-shirts along the nearby streets.
There on the shirts appeared an image of Baffert – or at least his famed white mane and sunglasses.
To find the country’s most recognizable trainer at the Preakness on May 18, well, he’ll be right there smack amid the proceedings, maybe even saddling the favorite.
With the 150th Kentucky Derby complete and the videos of its photo finish examined, next comes the 149th Preakness and its present-day subtext: the Baffert Triple Crown on-ramp. For the third straight first Saturday in May, Churchill Downs forbade him from the Derby in light of the drug tests in 2021 that cost his Medina Spirit an apparent victory. For the second straight third Saturday in May, he’ll join the Triple Crown already in progress, and here comes Muth, his Arkansas Derby winner.
“I look forward to bringing Muth to the Preakness,” Muth owner Amr Zedan said in a news release in late April after his lawsuit failed to elbow Muth into the Derby. That means Baffert, who wound up with the attention last year when his Havnameltdown broke down and died in the sixth race before his National Treasure won the Preakness in the 13th, will again find the spotlight at Pimlico Race Course.
Others aren’t coming. That includes Sierra Leone, who ran that herculean race in the Derby to come within a nose of winning. “I think giving him the five weeks to the Belmont is definitely (prudent),” trainer Chad Brown said. That includes Forever Young, who also ran a marvel of a race in the Derby before coming in a nose after Sierra Leone. He’s headed home to Japan. And that might include Mystik Dan, who actually won the Derby with jockey Brian Hernandez Jr.’s expert rail-side steering. “We’ll let him tell us,” trainer Ken McPeek told reporters at Churchill Downs on Sunday, taking the wait-and-see that another Lexington-based trainer, Eric Reed, used after winning the 2022 Derby with Rich Strike in a you’re-kidding shocker.
Told that Mystik Dan was a maybe Sunday, Brown said, “Really?”
The Preakness, which had just seven entries last year for the lowest in 37 years, sits on four straight winners who did not run the Derby: Swiss Skydiver in 2020, Rombauer in 2021, Early Voting in 2022 and National Treasure in 2023. (Swiss Skydiver’s win came on Oct. 3 after a Kentucky Derby held on Sept. 5 because of the pandemic.) While those winners won at odds of 12-1, 12-1, 7-2 and 4-1, Muth figures to step right in at shorter odds.
On March 30 at Oaklawn in the Arkansas Derby, he won by two lengths over Just Steel and by six over, well, Mystik Dan. He has won four of his six starts. That prompted a question about whether some trainers might shy away just because of the 71-year-old Baffert’s prowess with his record eight Preakness and 17 Triple Crown race wins.
“It doesn’t change anything for me,” Brown said by his Churchill Downs barn Sunday morning. “ … I could see maybe some people are considering that. … I don’t think people should, you know, trainers should be avoiding him. I know he has nice horses and he’s a great trainer, but I don’t know. I don’t worry about things like that. I just run.”
Any misgivings for McPeek also don’t involve Baffert: He’ll be looking back across Mystik Dan’s past performances. After winning the Derby on Saturday, McPeek said he “ran this colt back too quick in November. He won really easy in his maiden race (Nov. 12), and I wanted to stretch him out, and it was the end of the season. I ran him back (Nov. 25) in an allowance race going a mile, and he coughed up a lung infection on me. Learned a little lesson there with him.”
Whoever does run, the market for T-shirts won’t be as robust.
Robert Osbourn reckons he sold about 150 of them at $20 per to passersby who had parked in the neighborhood. He served as a bit of a monitor of public opinion on Baffert, which included taking on the odd expletive from non-fans. He laughed as he told of that.
“Pretty much 75 percent of the public doesn’t really know what goes on,” he said, “and you know, he’s personally been good to me and to the nonprofit I work for, so I thought this was just a fun T-shirt. And I think he served his two years and Churchill has kind of done some messed-up s— this year (tacking on another year of suspension after initially demanding two). You know, they said, ‘Hey he could come back this year,’ then they’re like, ‘Nah, no he can’t.’ ”
Baffert had won Osbourn’s heart by donating to the nonprofit Stable Recovery, which aims to help people with addiction with a 90-day program that trains them as grooms. “We’d just had a big fundraiser for Stable Recovery,” Osbourn said. “And I took the weekend off and went to Nashville, and I was with my buddy, and, I don’t know, it just hit me. I was like: ‘Hey, I want to try to do something that’s fun around the Derby. I know it’ll piss people off, but then I know (some) people are for it.’”
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