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Originally Posted by The Bid
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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You're points basically confirm my intial thoughts. How can the same surface that we use here and in Dubai (polytrack and Tapeta) act completely different to how they do there?
There can only be one reason, and that is because how the tracks are prepared and managed.
I've never seen either polytrack or tapeta throw up much/if any kickback, and I've been watching AW racing for many years now.
Doesn't that suggest to you, that where the kickback is bad, the track officials are doing something wrong?
AW tracks were NEVER sold as minimal preparation - The Americans who decided to test it assumed that, and now are blaming the surface. There is a phrase we have here - "bad workman always blame their tools"
There have been reports written by many different racing professionals who all say that AW surfaces are by far the safest surface for a horse to race on, given their spounge-like feel with no jar, but at the same time only gets as deep as it needs to be. We've never had problems (injury-wise) with it, and any breakdowns, injuries there have been have not been linked to the surface itself. Trainers here say they can run horses more regularly on the synthetics as it doesn't take as much out of them and they never come back sore like many of the younger horses do, when encountering a much faster/harder track.
I don't want to argue, because unlike many, you do appreciate turf racing. Many of the moaners are just doing so because they dislike turf racing.
But I do like to point out that across the pond, the surface is always to blame, and not those preparing it for racing, and given the characteristics of the exact same surface are so different on one side of the Atlantic to the other, to me it's obvious that the problem lies solely with how the surface is prepared rather than the surface itself.
Polytrack especially can be prepared for speed. When it was still new as a racecourse surface at here, regularly biases would change, while the track management team got to learn about it. One meeting the speed would be massively favoured, the next it was the hold up horses who were favoured, but over time they found the ideal speed of the track, which is seeminly working out to be fair to both types of runners - and the statistics prove that.