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Originally Posted by Rupert Pupkin
Cannon, How do you feel about polytrack? Have you trained on it at all?
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I have trained over it since last september 05 with mostly positive results. There was no way that I would have ever considered training at Turfway prior to the polytrack being installed there. The old track was terrible. I believe that I have personally had pretty good numbers over the poly so I guess I cant complain too much. The best feature other than ability to train through rainy weather is consistency. Pretty much you are training over the same surface everyday. I know about the kickback problems that we had at TP and the problems at Woodbine and HP but I think that much of this is due to human error as the track supers are training on the job in dealing with the surface. The biggest thing that they have to learn is that they have to deal with poly almost completely differently than a convential track. So it is a learning process for everyone. As far as injuries, it seems as though they have been reduced in my barn but its not like sore horses magically become sound overnight as some would have you believe. Eventually a sore horse will improve over poly but if the issues are related to conformation, they are still gonna have problems. Like it or not I think that the majority of dirt tracks will eventually go poly if not simply because breakdowns are going to occur and if a track has a big horse in a big race breakdown, the pressure to go poly will be severe. And tracks seem to cave in at the slightest bit of bad pub nowdays.