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Originally Posted by parsixfarms
Living up in Saratoga (where it's also been raining on and off for the better part of June), I can't comment on the weather from first hand experience, but from what I hear from our trainers, it just seems that the weather downstate has not been conducive to drying the turf courses. I'm sure a few sunny, 90 degree days will do that, if they ever come. Until it happens, we all have to do the best we can, and I speak as someone trying to get a horse on the turf (but I'm not looking to run him over a boggy course for his first start on turf). Actually, as BTW said above, there have been a few times where we were looking for a race to come off the turf, and it was surprisingly kept on given the relative softness of the course.
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Let me try to make this as simple as possible. I've been to my local park when the grass there has been flooded by too much rain. This is something that's evident. Not only is the grass wet but you can't even walk on it without your feet sinking into the mud. Walk through one of these areas and you need a month to clean off the mud from your sneakers.
I've been to the Prospect Park and some smaller parks in my area during this period. I've run over the grass; I've cycled over the grass. NO PROBLEMA. In fact, while there have certainly been a good number of day where portions of the paved areas in Prospect Park have been so wet you couldn't cycle over them, there's never been a day when I couldn't walk and run freely over the grass. Why are the BEL turf courses so saturated with water? Why won't they absorb and dry like normal grass does? Why is the BEL turf SOFT when MTH is FIRM? Something indigenous to the Elmont region?
This is all BS. It's ****in grass, they're horses and they've been running over wet grass and dirt throughout their history. NYRA just needs to let them run on it and stop making an issue out of the trivial.
At this rate anyone with turf horses in NY will just start shipping to MTH, DEL, PHA, and elsewhere, like Henning, McLaughlin, Tagg, Pletcher, Contessa, and others are already doing. Then it becomes an issue of why they really need to be in NY.