All of these major races run over the artifical surfaces have looked like eyesores to me.
Just ugly looking races.
I guess if you like watching slow-paced races, with bunched up fields, and horses racing fairly erratically it might be for you. It's about as entertaining as watching pacers without sulkys.
There is something very beautiful when watching an awesome performance, by a top class horse, in a truly run dirt race.
After I make any notes I need, I tape over these major synthetic races because they are tremendously unenjoyable to watch.
The only two from this year that I know I still have kept tape of are the Blue Grass and Hollywood Gold Cup. Obviously two painfully ugly races to watch, but I had to keep the one because it represented the deepest field in a Derby prep, and the other one because it represented Lava Man's 3rd straight Gold Cup.
Watching Domincan rally wide into the teeth of disgracefully slow fractions, to nab Street Sense, is almost unbearable.
The Hollywood Gold Cup might have been even harder to watch....with Ap Xcellent (who's never won on anything but cushion track) losing to Lava Man by a nose, with a stoutly closing and moderate Big Booster flying at him.
The races are run like turf races, but horses don't close with those exciting late bursts like they do on turf. It's more of a steady grinding move.
If racing everywhere was switched from natural dirt surfaces, to artifical dirt surfaces, I would obviously still be involved in day-to-day betting and nothing like that would change.
But, there is no way I'd consider myself a fan of the sport anymore. I love true dirt racing, and have a video library with tapes of races from virtually every Graded Stakes winner this decade, virtually every Grade 1 winner through the 90's, virtually every champion to race from the 80's, and all of the top horses from the 70's.
I can only speak for myself, but I find polytrack racing to be tremendously boring and uninteresting. Even when you have a bet on the race, you still feel like you want to sleep away the first half of the race.
But hey, we all know how natural dirt is such a demanding and crippling surface.
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