Nobody is going to convince Dancer's Image that a dog's life is all that bad. Consider just one week in the life of a horse. First, Dancer's Image was disqualified from first place in the Kentucky Derby; then he was disqualified from third place in the Preakness.
It took the stewards at Louisville's Churchill Downs race track 43 hours of interrogation and deliberation to decide what to do about Peter Fuller's grey colt, who was found to have been drugged when he won the Derby. In the end, the stewards succeeded only in adding to the mystery that surrounds the case. They awarded first place (plus the $122,600 purse) to Calumet Farm's Forward Pass. They suspended the Dancer's trainer, Lou Cavalaris, and his assistant, Robert Barnard, for 30 days. They issued a tight-lipped statement that spoke of "certain matters" that were deserving of "further investigation and action." But they did not say what those "certain matters" were, and left the job of probing into them to the Kentucky state racing commission. Nor, for that matter, did the stewards directly answer a single one of the pressing questions in the case.
Did Dancer's Image receive a dose of the painkiller Butazolidin too few hours before the Derby? The colt suffers from chronically sore and swollen ankles, and Cavalaris admitted giving him the anti-inflammatory analgesic on Sunday, 144 hours before the race. The drug was actually administered by a veterinarian, Dr. Alex Harthill, who turns out to be something of a controversial figure. Although he is known as "the Derby Vet" for treating such former winners of the race as Carry Back, Northern Dancer and Lucky Debonair, Harthill has twice been implicated in drugging scandals. In 1954, he was suspended "indefinitely" (later reduced to 60 days) by stewards at Chicago's Washington Park for administering a stimulant to a horse that subsequently won a $25,000 stakes race. In 1956, he was acquitted by a New Orleans court of charges that he bribed a testing-laboratory official to destroy urine and saliva specimens taken from a horse at the Fair Grounds race track.
Harthill and Cavalaris both insist that neither of them gave Dancer's Image a second dose of Butazolidin, that the "Bute" discovered in his urine after the Derby must have been residue from the Sunday treatment—although horses normally retain Butazolidin in their systems for no more than 72 hours. There was speculation that because Dancer's Image stood in ice (to reduce the ankle swelling), also received steroid and B-complex-vitamin injections, the Butazolidin was "frozen" in his system for an abnormally long time.