[King Glorious]

I looked up something real quick. I checked out all of the horses that have won main track graded stakes at Keeneland since they went to poly. I didn't look at the grass races that were rained off the grass though. I wanted to see how many other graded stakes wins they had that weren't on the Keeneland poly. Here's what I found:

They have won 19 other dirts stakes
They have won 17 other synthetic stakes
They have won 17 other grass stakes

I don't think there's a dirt track in the country that you'd find as many winners that had as much success on grass as they have on dirt. But I think there's more reasoning than simply grass horses like poly more than dirt horses. I think it has something to do with opportunity and self-fulfilling prophecy. Here's what I mean. Pretty much everyone considers Monmouth to be a speed favoring track. So what happens is a trainer with a horse like Rachel will look to the Haskell before he looks at Saratoga's Jim Dandy. On the flip side, a trainer with a horse like Mine that Bird will think Monmouth doesn't suit his horse's style so he won't go there. What ends up happening is more speed horses run at Monmouth than at another track so of course more speed horses will win there. It's kind of the same thing with breeding. If I sent you 25 2yos by Yes It's True, chances are you would try the majority of them out in dirt sprints because you think that's what they are best at. What would you do if I sent you 25 2yos by Saddler's Wells? Would you be looking for dirt sprints? Probably not. The majority of them would be immediately put on the grass. Of course then you'd have dirt sprinters by Yes It's True and turf horses by Saddler's Wells and you won't know what they could have done if you reversed them because you didn't even try it. The stereotype leads to the continuation of the myth. The question is how does the myth start in the first place? Early on, we saw more grass horses entered to run on the polytrack. If they had not performed well, we wouldn't be seeing as many as we do now. But they did perform well. We saw Asi Siempre and Silent Name and Street Sounds and Eccentric all taking important main track races. Everyone saw it. So that encouraged others to try. So we see the Raven's Pass' and the Gio Pointi's, the Einstein's and the Ventura's. These are all good horses that may or may not have been able to win if the races were on real dirt. But if they were, some of these horses wouldn't have even been tried on it so we'd never know. What Plonk and others are missing is not that we are saying that grass horses win more than dirt horses on synthetics but that grass horses win more on synthetics than they do on dirt. It's pretty clear also that the best grass horses usually beat the best dirt horses on synthetic tracks. The tracks are more an alternate turf course than they are a dirt substitute.