No chance to dance.
We breed these horses for speed here, and artificial surfaces takes speed totally out of the equation
As for Mike Dickenson, what did he ever do? He couldnt keep a horse sound more than 6 races a season training over that bullshit track, Tapeta. If he was such a good trainer he would have stuck with that instead of running a racket and selling it to all the morons involved in racing as revolutionary surface. Im not knocking the guy for getting over on the entire industry, but to say his track is safer, and there is conslusive evidence its safer, that is ridiculous.
Tapeta is a turf substitute surface. It trains like turf, its ran like turf, the races shake out like turf. Euros like it because the grass horses handle it. Im happy they handle it. The problem is we run on dirt here in the states. It was counterproductive for our industry to install any synthetic surface. It works in Europe because the horses transition from the turf to the plastic. I love grass racing, I love dirt racing, its natural either way. Any synthetic surface used for racing is obscene and defies logic, and history. Not to mention it has no positive impact on the soundness of horses
Preperation on these tracks is supposed to be minimal, it takes an intensive effort to keep them raceworthy.
Kickback on these surfaces is ridiculous, the worst I have ever seen. Horses will not tuck in, thats why horses are coming down the middle of the course, they do not want their eyeballs knocked out.
You may suggest anything you want with our breeding program, it is greatly flawed, our entire industry is flawed. However, adding paper mache to the mix certianly did not help matters.
What we are talking about here is some of the South American horses, or traditional dirt horses handling Tapeta in Dubai. They will not
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