They have no idea what they are doing. From what I heard the Santa Anita surface before cushion was absolutely horrible so I guess anything was better.

They might as well just cancel racing in California and start again next year :)

wonder if cushion track has a 90 day money back guarantee? magna getting ready to throw some crazy (crazier?) money around....what a mess.

I imagine if they spent $11 million on a new dirt surface they could have come up with a very safe one.

some questions arise...

why did CHRB mandate an across the board surface change at all tracks? did they do due diligence? what caused them to feel that all thracks in cali had serious issues, serious enough to warrant a wholesale change-other than bay meadows of course?

if santa anita wanted to duplicate the track at hollywood, why didn't they? they admitted they used finer sand, the supposed cause of all the drainage problems. why the change? how would finer sand help in higher temps? if an all weather track has weather related issues, is it still a better alternative then dirt?
is it the change to an AWT that helps horses, or just changing from an old, worn, compressed track to a newer surface, complete with a new base?

exactly!

any idea how long a dirt track lasts? lots of pounding of hooves, lots of heavy equipment running over the track. how many years before they should resurface? altho dirt has been around for ever, it doesn't necessarily follow a dirt track can remain in place forever.

NO! We must finish ShowVivor :)

San Pasqual Saturday.. plus the Raphael and Fernando..
Santa Ysabel Sunday..
San Gorgonio Monday..

Paseana will be shoehorned in there somewhere too..

In 1998 or 1999 (I forget) after a big spate of injuries and deaths, Del Mar spent half a million completely redoing their dirt track, taking the cushion off, redoing the base from scratch, then reapplying the cushion inch by inch.

According to Richard Shapiro, chair of CHRB, it was the 227 dead horses on the CA tracks in 2005.

Golden Gate keeps going how they are going they may have 300 dead by the end of this meet

Where are you guys getting this information from? There are no journalists out there?

California wacko-enviromentalists made them change the composition of the track at Santa Anita because they felt there would be damaging effects to the surrounding enviroment from run-off on the original composition. As soon as they compromised the original composition of the synthetic materials they were asking for trouble. What a debacle.

Daily a horses are breaking down at Golden Gate. I wish someone would publish the statistic its got to be grotesque.

I found it, and posted details on another thread. Here it is, apparently from Dan Ilman's DRF Form Blog:

2 broke down, 9 vanned off, 5 walked off, 1 horse stopped work as it's saddle slipped.

The spill in the 7th was a horse that clipped heels and went down, and another horse then fell over it.

You think thats acceptable?

I think that 2 breakdowns and 9 vanoffs shouldn't be repeated within multiple sources as "17 breakdowns and vanoffs", when it's not.