From the Triple Crown races of the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes, to the Breeders’ Cup and beyond, it’s impossible to think about horse racing without also conjuring the shadow of all the beautiful Thoroughbreds who’ve died on the track.
CNN reporter Katie Bo Lillis usually covers the intelligence community and national security issues, but when she noticed news reports about an alarming flurry of racehorse deaths on tracks across the country in 2023, she knew she had to step into the conversation.
“It was less of ‘I’ve got to look into this’ and more of an ‘Oh, my God! There’s so much here that people are missing!’” Lillis said via a Zoom interview from her D.C.-area home two days before the 151st Kentucky Derby. “There’s more to this story than is being conveyed in most of the articles that I was reading by very talented and well-meaning journalists. But this is just a hard, esoteric world.”
Lillis knows this world firsthand, having grown up around horse racing. At 19, she got a job exercising racehorses at a stable in rural Virginia, and by her own account, she’s never lost the sense of awe either for the Thoroughbred or the people who dedicate their careers to them.
“I knew that world. I loved that world. And I thought, ‘I can sit in this Venn diagram and I can be the translator,’” Lillis said. “I thought, ‘I’m probably the only reporter alive who has both of these sets of expertise…to tell this story in a professional and compelling way.’”
So she harnessed all of her research and reporting skills as a journalist with her knowledge of horses and racing to produce her first book, “Death of a Racehorse: An American Story” — what will no doubt long be considered one of the most clear-eyed, moving, unsettling and thorough testaments to the sport of kings.
Published May 6 by Simon & Schuster, it’s in stores just in time for the run of the Triple Crown, Thoroughbred racing’s most coveted and storied series of races held May through June. The book is neither the vindication of racing practices some fans might want, nor the condemnation of the sport some animal rights advocates call for. What’s in its pages is much more complex and nuanced.
“I’d spent years in this world, and, like many people in racing, really took for granted that it made sort of intuitive sense to everyone else – but it’s a completely bonkers world if you are not steeped in it every day,” she said. But being a journalist, “I had a little bit of a leg up in the sense that I knew which questions I would get asked from a mainstream audience.”
The propulsive narrative of the book begins on the shocking death of Kentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit at Santa Anita Park. It then brings into the picture the most successful yet controversial trainer in the sport’s history, Bob Baffert — who just this year returned to the Kentucky Derby after a three-year suspension for using a medication on Medina Spirit that was prohibited for race-day use.
From there, the story reads with the pacing of a crime drama, threading the byzantine complexity of the race world, from the breeding practices to track schedules optimized to make money even at the expense of horses’ health. Lillis goes to great lengths to explain the confusing and complicated array of medicines and performance-enhancing drugs – legal and otherwise – administered to the horses.
“A lot of that I didn’t know,” Lillis admitted. “Particularly the limitations of drug testing. Going into the project, I thought, ‘I’m going to talk to some toxicologists and some testing experts, and they are going to help me follow the science and come up with a pretty good picture of what probably happened with, let’s say, Medina Spirit.’ Well, nothing could actually be further from the truth. Testing is actually an incredibly limited tool. It can’t tell you how a drug got into a horse’s body. It can’t tell you the intent of the administrator, or whether it was accidentally ingested by the animal. And that’s even before you get to the sort of designer drugs…I found that really interesting and surprising.”
As for the famed trainer Bob Baffert, who comes across as a sort of anti-hero in the story, Lillis said she went in “with very much an open mind.”
Trainer Bob Baffert watches a horse outside his barn at Churchill Downs Monday, April 28, 2025, in Louisville, Ky. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)“I had no idea what my conclusion was going to be at the end of this project,” she said. ”Am I going to develop a picture of somebody that I think, you know, probably does use illegal substances? Or am I going to develop a picture of somebody that I think has been scapegoated and turned into a villain for the industry?”
And here’s how Lillis weighs the score on Baffert: “I would say Baffert has effectively become a scapegoat for the industry’s broader problems — which isn’t to say that Baffert hasn’t made mistakes, or that he hasn’t perhaps been sloppy in his management practices when it comes to medication in his barn. But there’s no evidence that the guy dopes, and so to treat him as some kind of unique villain, I think, is quite unfair.
“He’s no better and no worse than a lot of other horse trainers. He’s a part of this environment. And I came to enormously respect Bob as a horse trainer. He’s a tremendous horseman. There’s nobody who knows how to select or prepare a horse better than Bob.”
Lillis explained: “I think the notion of welfare at the racetrack has gotten reduced to just this idea of ‘well, trainers are evil.” It is not that I don’t think trainers have places that they can improve their animal husbandry. However, the whole industry is a system that has created incentives that are not always great for the animal. And I get really frustrated when trainers get scapegoated as the one evil actor in this industry. I don’t think anything could be further from the truth. I love horse trainers, candidly, and I think racetracks have just as much to answer for, and the bloodstock industry.”
She said Baffert, who in person is a “real raconteur” was “a fascinating character” to write about: “At the same time that I think he has been treated as worse than he is, he also is kind of a symbol for some of the practices in the industry that I do think need reform – things that have been done a certain way for a long time, and if the sport wants to survive, it has to resolve.”
While Lillis does paint a picture of positive reforms in animal husbandry that racing has undergone in the last few years, lurking in the background of “Death of a Racehorse” is a larger existential question: Is it too late?
Is there a future for the old sport of racing in a new world that’s fundamentally changed?
A world where there are more legal gambling options, where the expansive stretches of land used in racing could be turned into mini malls or subdivisions, and, finally, in a world where people’s only interaction with animals is as pets, where most people have lost the concept of working livestock?
“They think about them like cats and dogs, and I very much wanted to act as a translator for that idea that these animals are not pets, and that it is not inherently evil to not think of them as pets.
“I felt there was this huge disconnect in how the industry understood the animal, which is basically as livestock – beloved livestock, but livestock. By the way, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Nor is there anything that is inherently damaging to the idea of good welfare in saying an animal is livestock. But it is not how the rest of the world thinks about these animals,” she said.
That’s not to say that the people who make their careers in horseracing don’t care about the horses, Lillis believes.
“I’m sure there’s a few individual a-holes as there are in every field. But the vast majority of people who work in Thoroughbred racing are not callous to the animal. They love the animal and do their best by it in the system that they operate in.”
And it’s that toxic system Lillis scrutinizes to such powerful effect in her book, urging an honest reckoning of the way the incentive structures in this commercial industry can harm horses.
Lillis argues there are plenty of reasons why as a society we should want to fix that system and make the sport more humane and sustainable: “Racing produces an enormous number of jobs. It preserves green space, it creates tax revenue. It creates agricultural jobs in a time in which all of our other jobs are migrating to ones and zeros on the Internet. Wouldn’t it be really nice if we managed to keep a few jobs around with people who work with their hands and who work with a living animal? I think that is an inherently noble cause.”
And while she details in the book how the industry is improving through regulatory and cultural shifts that are substantially lowering fatalities at the track, Lillis also paints a picture of an industry at war with itself.
“So, I am not a hundred percent confident that the industry will be able to get its act together in time to save itself,” she said.
But if we lose racing, do we risk losing the beautiful, bred-to-run Thoroughbred horse itself?
“The other big welfare thing that I think people don’t really grapple with is when you have advocates who want to get rid of the sport: If you end racing, who is going to pay to take care of all of those horses who suddenly have no value? It is a huge welfare issue,” she said.
“This is not like greyhound racing, where you can rehome these animals to people’s houses in suburban areas and in cities. You have to have people who know what they are doing, and have the money and the space and the willingness to take on some of these often very difficult animals – not all of whom may be suited to another career as a trail horse.
“That’s always a big frustration that I have with the ‘get rid of horse racing’ people. I’m like, OK, cool. Well, what’s your plan? It’s all well and good to say, ‘I think horse racing should not be continued.’ That is a justifiable position to take. I don’t share it, but it is a justifiable ethical argument to say, you know, ‘I don’t think making money off of an animal for our entertainment alone, when that on occasion endangers the animal, should continue.’ I can accept that position.
“However, I want people who have that viewpoint to read this book and say, ‘Oh, man, there are a lot of practical problems we have to consider if that is the step that we want to take.”
Because that might not be the death, but the extinction, of the racehorse.
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