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The Kentucky Derby is on Saturday, horse racing's marquee event. One of the horses running is actually named Journalism, which is very exciting for this reporter, but there's a lot to pay attention to here. Because underneath the gambling and glamorous presentation, every race comes with some grim possibilities.

At Churchill Downs, home of the Derby, 12 horses died in about a month, leading the facility to suspend racing operations.

Tonight, another dark turn for Santa Anita Park, this was the 34th horse to have died at the historic Arcadia Track since the day after Christmas.

It's not just the turf or the surface they're racing on, there's medication issues.

Question now being asked were some trainers over medicating their horses running them

A string of high profile scandals and deaths in recent years has led some people both in and outside the horse racing community to ask, why are we still doing this? My guest is CNN's senior reporter, Katie Bo Lillis. She's the author of a new book called "Death of a Race Horse: an American Story." We're gonna talk about why accusations of animal cruelty in the horse racing industry may be more complicated than you think. From CNN, this is One Thing. I'm David Rind.

So Katie Bo, we normally talk to you on the show about national security issues. You're reporting on the intelligence community, but today we're doing something quite different. You've been doing a lot of reporting on the troubled sport of horse racing, horse racing. So what gives?

'Well, David, I grew up in rural Virginia, and when I was 15 or 16, I got my first summer job doing what's called walking hots at the racetrack there, which is basically hand-walking racehorses after they have exercised in the morning to cool them out.

Okay.

And I just fell in love with the sport. I was a teenager and I was getting up at 3.30 in the morning, seven days a week to go to So that tells you how much I liked what I was doing. I really came to love working with these very intelligent, sensitive, really challenging animals. I loved the thrill of watching them run. And I loved all of whom are working in the sport because they can't imagine doing anything different. So I wound up working in the sport for a few years out of college at the racetrack and then later on at some of the big commercial breeding farms in central Kentucky who specialize in breeding the horses that you see in the Kentucky Derby and the other 30,000 races that are run across the United States in a given year.

So the Kentucky Derby is this coming weekend and admittedly, every time I see it pop up year after year, I think to myself, they're still doing this, huh? So broadly speaking, like what is the state of this sport right now? Because you mentioned that it's not just the Kentucky derby, you know, there are a bunch of other smaller races that go on, you now, all the time.

Yeah, racing is so much bigger than the Derby and some of the other kind of bigger races that you might see broadcast on national television periodically through the year. Most of the races that run in the United States every year are pretty workaday. And there's a lot of people who are training horses, owning horses, working with them in some way or another in this industry that are not millionaires who own horses worth millions, literally millions of dollars. You know, they are just sort of normal. Average middle class, everyday folks. But across the sport, kind of from the top level to the mid levels to even the really low levels of the sport. It's in a moment of what I think is fair to call existential crisis. There are a lot of people out there who believe we ought to do away with racing entirely because they believe that basically trainers are doping their horses to run through pain and their legs break and they die. This is something that we sometimes see. You know, quite literally on Kentucky Derby Day in some of these big races. And the death toll is in the hundreds every year. That's a very tiny fraction of the percentage of races run per year, but it's still too high. The reality of what's causing this is really, really complicated. People have really seized on the case of this guy, Bob Baffert, who is kind of the sport's most iconic trainer.

'Yeah, I will say that is the one horse-horsing name that I actually know.

Right, you know him. You know the white hair, you've seen the purple sunglasses, he won the Triple Crown twice, which is just like unheard of.

To the turn is probably the most important part of the whole race. You want your horse in there, good spot, good position going to the first turn.

He's a hell of a horse trainer.

It looks like a Ferrari going around. It just does it effortlessly, so.

He has also had a number of really high profile drug violations, including one in the derby for a horse called Medina Spirit in 2021 for a drug that is totally legal to use in training, but is not allowed in a horse's system on race day.

Medina Spirit tested positive for something called better methazone.

And then eight months later, the horse dies. It's a freak thing.

The rilling of the necropsy shows no definitive cause of death in the thoroughbred. Trainer Bob Baffert saying Medina spirit suffered a heart attack at the time, but the report came out and said Medina spirits swollen lungs are common in horses dying suddenly, but not a cardiac specific cause of death.

'But the fact that he had this high-profile violation on such a big day, resulting in the disqualification of this horse, and then the fact the horse died, really left folks with the impression that Racing's biggest star has this huge problem, and they wanted to know why the sport tolerated him. I personally don't think that picture of Baffert is entirely fair, but it has contributed to this kind of moment of crisis that the sport is in.

Well, yeah, so can we step back? Can you explain just how widespread the use of medication is in these horses and where does that tip over into a possible competitive edge for the horse while they're racing?

'There are two very different categories of drugs. One of them is completely banned substances doping, and we can talk about that in a minute. But the reason why the sort of Baffert story has been so confusing, I think, for people is that there's this other separate class of drugs that racing calls therapeutics. Horses are athletes. And just like pro athletes get joint injections and they take anti-inflammatories, so do horses. They are totally legal, although most of them have to be out of your system on race day because you don't want an animal where the pain has been masked and they are running through pain and then potentially injuring themselves. The question with these kinds of drugs is how much is too much? Like when have you gone from humanely helping an athlete perform to forcing performance from a horse that should instead have rest? And when the financial incentive is to get the horse to the track to run in races and win money, you can see how that can become a conflict of interest really, really quickly.

Wait, so if there is all these therapeutics for the athlete here, which is the horse, who is being asked to go at top speed in these races and these therapeutcs will help them be more comfortable after being pushed to such a limit, how is that not doping in some way if it's going to help them do this job that they're being asked to do?

Yeah, it's a really good question, and it is a really hard question to answer. It's not as simple as just saying, this drug good, this drug bad. I think the main distinction in between what people think of as doping and what people think of as therapeutics is simply, does the drug have a legitimate application for humane management of the athlete, and is it legal, right? The winner of Every race is always tested for both illegal doping agents as well as legal therapeutics that they are not supposed to have in their system on race day that they're only allowed to use during training. The problem that racing has is the exact same one that human sports have as well. Drug testing is actually really, really limited. Drug testing cannot tell you how a drug got into a horse's system. It can't tell you if some substance came from a naturally occurring weed that was accidentally ingested as part of a horse daily bag of hay, or if it came from the trainer giving the horse a shot with a synthetic version of that same substance to try to boost his performance. You know, that leaves racing in the position of asking, should the trainer be punished if he says it was contaminated feed, but like maybe it could have been. Intentionally administered, it's really, really hard. The other problem is that labs have to know what drug they're looking for in order to able to see it on drug screening.

Oh, so they're not just running a generic screen that's going to pop up every single known drug to man, like they have to actually look for it.

'That's something called full scan mode. It can be done, but it's crazy expensive. What they instead do is they run a screening test for known substances. What that has meant in practice is that you have drug makers out there who are creating an entire class of drugs called designer drugs, where they take a known performance enhancer, let's say EPO, blood doping, they change one little molecule. That doesn't change the performance-enhancing impact of the drug, but because that underlying formula is not exactly the same as the known version of EPO, drug testing won't catch it. The machine literally won't be able to see it. And that is the kind of drug that eventually wound up catching the FBI's interest way back in 2017.

So Katie Bo, where we last left off, law enforcement was just starting to look into doping and bracing. So where'd they start?

So one of the powerful industry organizations called the Jockey Club, their leadership got really tired of what they believed was a widespread doping problem in horse racing. They looked around and they were like, gosh, these people who don't have any business winning races seem to be winning races. And they hired a private intelligence company called Five Stones Intelligence to try to look into doping and racing. Five Stones found a little bit of information that suggested this might be going on, and they passed it along to the FBI. The top agent at the FBI in this particular unit that this intelligence company kind of handed this dossier to had himself actually grown up in horse racing. And he looked at, it was a guy named Sean Richards, and he looked this sort of strange compendium of kind of random intel about random horse trainers up and down the East Coast. And he went, I can do something with this.

Hello? All right, sis, I'll let you.

So, the FBI launches an investigation, they ultimately get a bunch of wiretaps.

You know, the idea thing is, you know, not commercially available, so when somebody turns it into the race jurisdiction, nobody's going to test for it, you know, because it's not known until it's known.

And some of the audio that the FBI was getting on these wiretaps was wild. You had trainers and veterinarians who were sort of talking openly about how to avoid regulatory scrutiny. You know, how to make sure that they didn't get caught by track regulators.

And what I'm trying to say is anytime you give something to a horse, whether or not they test for it, that's another story.

Giving drugs that they were not supposed to give to these horses with the explicit goal of enhancing their performance.

Started on so I just I only gave him the blue cap and I gave them the VO2 the day of and I got a second and a third with him and everyone told me what a piece of s**t he is but he raced like really really good so

You had one trainer that really sticks out in my memory talking about, he's talking to his, I think his assistant trainer, and he says, you know, geez, if regulators had showed up at my barn today, they would have caught us pumping and fuming every horse in the place.

Pretty damning.

Yes, there was no question that the trainers that were caught up in this investigation knew that what they were doing was against the rules of racing.

The defendants who we charge today engaged in this conduct, not for the love of the sport and certainly not out of care for the horses, but for money.

And the FBI was able to ultimately bring charges against dozens of trainers and veterinarians. They actually got them on FDA misbranding charges.

Not only were the substances medically unnecessary, they were adulterated and misbranded.

Because the drugs in question, oftentimes, were these designer drugs that I was just sort of describing with the one molecule tweaked, right? And so the legal charge that the FBI was able to prove was this FDA violation. It was a little bit like getting Al Capone on their income taxes.

People are rightfully disturbed by the mistreatment of animals who have absolutely no means of defense. Today's arrest should put anyone who chooses to follow in the footsteps of those charged today in the stoping scheme on alert.

And I can remember when the indictments first came down in March of 2020, and the reaction in horse racing was just total shock that one, the federal government was interested in them at all, and two, that somebody had actually been called to account for doping.

So obviously gambling is an integral part of the sport. It always has been. And now that sports betting is legal in so many states, you know, people can get to it right on their phones. How has that changed the dynamic of how this whole sport operates?

'It has shrunk the pie. You and I are talking about welfare as this kind of existential issue for the sport, but the bigger issue is actually just that people have more options for gambling and they are gambling less and less on racing. And people gambling on racing, racing used to have a monopoly on legalized gambling in the United States that obviously has changed and racetracks are really struggling. And this has a huge welfare component because... You know, the thing you really have to understand about racing is that racetracks are in the gambling business. They're not in the horse business. The racetrack makes its money by withholding a percentage of all the dollars wagered on its races. And in what's called paramutual wagering, which is what horse racing wagering is, gamblers bet against each other. They don't bet against the house. So the more people gamble, the more money the track makes. They don' care who wins or loses. That doesn't matter for them. So for the racetrack they wanna get as many horses to run in each race as possible because that's the gambling product that makes them the most money. So that means in practical terms that the racetracks often put pressure on trainers to run horses who maybe shouldn't be running. And that also contributes to the breakdown issue. It's part of the incentive for using all of these therapeutic medications. So, I think one of the really misunderstood things about horse racing is people tend to think, oh, well, these terrible trainers just want to run their horses in lots of races and make lots of money, but they are in fact operating in a system that is a lot bigger than them. And one thing that I also think is really important to remember is that racing creates a lot of jobs beyond just, it's not just like the guy training the horse. Like, it takes an enormous amount of labor to take care of these horses on a day-to-day basis. So you have. The barn staff, you have grooms, then you have the trainers, then you the jockeys, and then there's obviously the owners who own these horses. But there's also the hay farmer who is growing hay so that these horses have something to eat, or the feed man who is selling bags of sweet feed. So horse racing generates an enormous number of agricultural jobs and economic impact beyond just the guy training the horse.

I definitely hear that argument, but I do have to say, when I see a horse going all out, it lands funny, has to be put down right on the track in front of all the people, in front of all of the TV cameras. It's sickening, and even when they put the little tent up to block the view, I still have to turn away because it's like, who wouldn't? I totally get why some people say, even despite all the nuance that you described in terms of the welfare and all of the monetary issues at stake, that this is barbaric. Do you get a sense that the industry is sympathetic at all to those feelings in the year 2025?

Yeah, I think horsemen have a really mixed reaction to being told the sport is barbaric. Racing folks are heartbroken when there's a breakdown. People in the sport who work with these animals every day, I mean, you become attached to these horses. I have seen it. I worked in that business for a very, very long time. It's an intensely personal loss. There is a sense of failure, of wondering what could I have done differently? How could I have managed this horse's care differently? To prevent this from happening. But it is complicated because the fundamental thing that you've got to understand about racing and about horse racing people is that racing is an industry and the horses it uses are really better understood as livestock than they are as like pets, which I think is how a lot of people who don't have any exposure to horses think about them like

Right.

People make money on them. This is somebody's livelihood. So if you have an animal that breaks down on the track and dies, that's the loss of income. And remember, at some levels of the sport, that is making rent. That's not about getting rich. That's literally about paying your rent. So yes, there is sometimes an incentive to run a horse that shouldn't be running because you need the purse money or because the track is pressuring you to run. But there's also an equally strong, if not stronger, incentive to not let anything happen to that asset. So I think a lot of times the reaction that I hear from horse people is like, it just doesn't make any sense to say that we don't care about breakdowns. They absolutely do.

Well, so if this is like an existential moment for the sport, is there a world where enough people just kind of stop paying attention, stop gambling on it in a real way? Because like you said, there's just other things to gamble on right on the phone that this industry like cannot sustain itself in the way that it has for decades and decades.

Look, I think we're already watching that happen in real time. There are already conversations happening with one major track operator with tracks in Florida, in California, about whether the facilities in question are worth more. As something other than a racetrack. And so I think there's a very real chance that there are some major racing states that for reasons that don't have anything directly to do with the welfare issue, where racing may not exist in coming years. But look, if I leave you with one takeaway today, it is that racing is doing a lot There was a new federal law passed in 2020 governing health and safety, medication enforcement. It's made a lot of little changes, like increased veterinary oversight, that have added up to big improvement, like huge fatalities at tracks that this new authority governs. They have seen fatal injuries plummet. There are also some states that are fighting this new authorities, the new law that was passed, they're challenging it in the Supreme Court. Their fatality numbers remain really high. The sport has to, either through regulation or cultural change, do a better job of insulating this core commodity, which is the horse, from kind of raw market forces. Because these animals aren't cattle. They don't feed us. We do owe them a higher standard of care. But the good news is that I think there are a lot of people in the sport, and especially in my generation, who recognize that and are working on that issue in a not gotten serious about until the last few years.

Well, the book is called Death of a Race Horse, an American story. It's out May 6th, wherever you get your books. Katie Bow, thank you so much.

Thanks David.

One Thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin, Haley Thomas, and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director. And Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Alex Manessari, Mark Duffy, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Wendy Brundidge. We'll be back on Wednesday. I'll talk to you then.