The Churchill Downs stewards have confirmed what everyone with a brain knew all along: Jose Santos did not carry a battery aboard Funny Cide in the Preakness.

The announcement was made at a press conference Monday at Churchill, where the Commonwealth of Kentucky's chief steward Bernie Hettel patiently explained that a thorough review of the evidence, including an enlarged version of the original photo that helped fuel this mess in the first place, made it abundantly clear that Santos did nothing wrong. The press conference was attended by Santos, a class act, who expressed no bitterness or resentment over his ordeal and said it time to move on.

"It's been a little tough," he said. "I've been the talk of the town and this is a big town. A lot of people have been talking about me, but it's final. Finito."

Finito, it's not.

That's one of the many sorry aspects of one of the most troubling and mishandled stories to ever hit racing. This one was too big, too disturbing, for everyone to simply move on like it never happened. I'm afraid that for Santos and for the sport there has been some lasting damage that will not be so easy to repair.

The horse racing industry as a whole responded in the right way. Everyone quickly jumped to Santos' defense and dismissed the allegations as nonsense. If anything, his stature and his reputation will be enhanced within racing circles. He was grossly wronged, yet held his head high throughout the ordeal and waited it out until his integrity was verified. The racetrack likes people who show such character. Santos has always been well-liked. He'll be more popular than ever now.

It is outside the narrow world of horse racing that he may have a problem. The allegations of his use of a battery made international news. He was the lead story on the NBC national news telecast Saturday and the charges were splashed all over every newspaper in the country. Predictably, in New York, Santos has been the butt of jokes on talk radio. A lot of people don't get it and never will. To the masses who do not understand horse racing or the absurdity of the initial charges, Santos will forever be the guy who was supposed to have cheated in order to win the Kentucky Derby. It's something he knows he's going to have to face.

"There's always going to be a question," he said. "I'm pretty sure the people in racing will understand, but the public is always going to have questions about it. They will know that Jose Santos won the 129th Kentucky Derby, but he was questioned about carrying something in his hands. They didn't find anything. it's already passed, but that something we'll have to deal with."

When asked Monday how this scandal might affect racing, Hettel and Churchill Downs President Steve Sexton tried their very best to put a positive spin on the developments. They reasoned that the public would be more confident than ever in the integrity of thoroughbred racing after seeing the great lengths the industry went to get to the truth and the conclusions that the Kentucky Derby was not affected in any way by skulduggery. Sorry, that's not going to happen.

People are not going to focus on Santos' exoneration, and a lot of cynics probably won't be convinced that he was innocent. Instead, the public will remember the 129th Kentucky Derby as the one that they said was fixed. That's just the way our society is. It's the juicy stuff that everyone will remember.

This could not have come at a worse time. It's been just a bit more than six months since the Breeders' Cup Pick Six scandal rocked the game. People won't remember that the races themselves weren't fixed and that the crime was perpetrated not by racing insiders but by a bunch of computer geeks.

The sport wasn't guilty of anything then and it's certainly not guilty now. But perception is reality. Does the public put horse racing a mere peg ahead of professional wrestling? I'm afraid it might.

Though Santos has been cleared, this remains an awful story, and it never should have happened. Someone, somewhere, most notably at the Miami Herald, the paper that ran the original story suggesting Santos may have carried a battery, should have put a stop to it before it ever got so out of hand. But that didn't happen and the sport and Jose Santos' good name got roughed up because of it. A sorry chapter in American racing is not, unfortunately, finito.