Trainer Richard Baltas has been to the mountaintop and back. Three horses that the 62-year-old Belmont Heights resident claimed during his career – Freedom Crest, Big Macher and Going to Vegas – won graded stakes. It proved he knows how to develop horses.
Baltas also is familiar with the lowest of lows, completing a one-year suspension in December for widespread violations involving race-day supplements at Santa Anita in 2022. He also was fined $10,000 by the California Horse Racing Board. Overall, he missed a year and a half of training.
Baltas, who had close to 100 horses when he left, is starting over with about 30 while stabled at Santa Anita and San Luis Rey Downs. He doesn’t want to talk about the suspension. He’d rather look ahead and try to forget arguably the worst 18 months of his life.
“It (suspension) was a learning process,” Baltas said during an exclusive interview with the Southern California News Group this week. “A lot of good came out of it. I have to look at the positives, and I got to do some traveling to Europe and did some things I’d never done before because I was working all the time. I tried to stay positive. Went back to the gym, worried about my health, both physical and mental. Obviously I missed the horses because I’ve been doing it for a while, but I just tried to become a better person, trying to look at my faults and trying to correct them.”
It wasn’t just the suspension, though, that was a low point in Baltas’ life. During the time he was away from the sport he loves, his 93-year-old mother, Betty, died. Shortly thereafter, his 69-year-old brother, Alex, was killed in a car accident.
As it turns out, the suspension was a blessing when it came to his mom.
“I got to spend a lot of quality time with her before she passed, spending most of the day with her,” Baltas said. “She was in really good health and … the last couple of months she started declining, but she really only had a couple really bad…
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