Following the completion of a routine morning workout on Monday, Kentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit collapsed on the track at Santa Anita Park. He died suddenly of a probable cardiac event, according to the on-site veterinary team.
The Santa Anita Park veterinary team immediately took blood, hair and urine samples from Medina Spirit.
Those samples were sent to the California Horse Racing Board. A full necropsy, per protocol in California, run by the University of California–Davis’s School of Veterinary Medicine, will be performed to try to ascertain the exact cause of this sudden death. The results of the necropsy and toxicology studies will be released by the California Horse Racing Board. This is standard as part of their inquiry into the cause of this unfortunate event.
Medina Spirit will be missed by all those who worked with and cared for him. He was owned by Zedan Racing Stables and trained by Bob Baffert, who is fighting attempts by the Kentucky and New York racing commissions to ban him after Medina Spirit failed a post-Kentucky Derby drug test.
Medina Spirt ran in the Preakness Stakes and finished second to Knicks Go in the Breeders Cup Classic without incident.
