Keeneland returning to dirt

[ateamstupid]

Originally Posted by Calzone Lord

In 2013, He won 30% of his starts over synthetic tracks in North America, and he won a $10 million race on a synthetic track in Dubai.

He's got a barn mostly full of turf bred horse -- and he trains them on synthetic at Fair Hill ... it would be a surprise if he disliked synthetic tracks.

Pretty much. Motion is a great trainer, but expecting him to have an unbiased opinion on synthetic tracks is foolish.

The bottom line is the data on synthetic vs. dirt is inconclusive at best. Certain synth tracks (Presque Isle, Woodbine) have been markedly safer than the average dirt track, at least in terms of fewer catastrophic breakdowns. There are others (Del Mar, Hollywood) that have been as bad as the worst dirt tracks most years. Then there's the issue of soft tissue injuries, which many trainers have cited as more frequent on synthetic and which don't show up in the breakdown statistics.

Another inconvenient truth for the synthetic crowd is that the circuit which concerted the most effort in making its dirt safer -- NYRA -- got drastically fewer breakdowns in 2013. AQU went from 3.41 fatalities per 1,000 dirt starts to 1.85. BEL went from 1.86 to 0.88. SAR had a slight uptick from 1.23 to 1.29, but that has the smallest sample size of the three tracks.

The well-publicized breakdowns of Barbaro and Eight Belles were a flashpoint for this industry. Instead of getting out in front of the issue and using technology to make our dirt tracks safer, the powers that be cowed to the demagogues and turned the sport upside down with a drastic shift to unproven synthetic surfaces as a cure-all. It's been an unmitigated failure for the sport and marginally, if at all, safer for the horses.