Barn 33 was ghostly quiet nine days before the 148th Kentucky Derby, nothing but naked lightbulbs and empty stalls. There were two pairs of shoes leaning against the wall in the shedrow, but no humans or horses were present. The blank beige wall by the entrance to what has been the mecca of the Churchill Downs stable area for a quarter century screamed a silent message:
Bob Baffert is not here. Not welcome here. All but scrubbed from here.
The signs commemorating the white-haired trainer’s record-tying six Kentucky Derby wins and two Triple Crown triumphs are gone. The company line is that the racetrack took everything off the walls everywhere to repaint the barns during a renovation break last year—it was then up to the inhabitants of each barn to rehang them. With Baffert not around, the signs never went back up.
