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Medina Spirit’s owner, Amr Zedan of Saudi Arabia, was not immediately available for comment. Zedan’s attorney, Clark Brewster, said he had spoken with both his client and Baffert Monday morning. Both said Medina Spirit was training well after an impressive second place finish in the Breeders’ Cup Classic in November and was preparing for another race in the coming weeks, Brewster said.

“They are wracked with grief. It’s truly tragic,” Brewster said. “He was training great and moving easily and then Bob said when he finished up he just collapsed.”

At 12-to-1 odds, Medina Spirit was a surprising winner of the Derby, America’s most famous race. The colt was sold as a yearling for only $1,000 and was a bargain for Zedan, who paid just $35,000 for him. Medina Spirit’s victory was the seventh for Baffert trained horses in the Derby, a record.

A week after winning the Derby, however, Baffert announced that a post-race test found the drug betamethasone, a corticosteroid injected into joints to reduce pain and swelling, in Medina Spirit. At the time, Baffert strongly denied that he or anyone else on his team had administered the drug to Medina Spirit.

He gave a series of television and radio interviews in the following days offering various theories about how the colt had tested positive. He criticized Churchill Downs’s suspension of him as “harsh” and cited “cancel culture” for the controversy.