Nice editorial

[Riot]

Why is turf referred to as 'natural' like dirt is all manufactured?

Well, I answered this already, but self-deleted it by accident. Sorry.

Horses were designed to work on turf - hooves, legs, tendons, muscles, eyes, breathing, gut. Where do horses live on dirt?

Certainly turf courses are graded, grass types selected, drainage, divots replaced, etc. (less so with the centuries-old type tracks in Europe) But a dirt track is completely manufactured from scratch - drainage, base, and a mixture of soils (clay, loam, sand) specifically composed to a recipe (soils that may not even be local)

When people make these kinds of statements about 'other coutntries' they seem to forget that the scope of racing is so much larger in the US and the climates so much different that racing the majority of races on the turf is totally impractical.

I'm not forgetting. It is what it is in the US. Horse racing started primarily in the upper east, was imported from England and adapted to what we have here. We even developed the speedball specialist to run on our different type of track (dirt)

And the breakdown rates ion synthetic are statistically insignifigant compared to the prior surfaces (mostly because the records werent kept so comparing is difficult)

That's something you just made up. It is not true. Go on PubMed, there's plenty there.

Simply using breakdown rates to say that a track is/isn't safe or is safer is folly as it ignores the vast amount of influences beyond surface that cause horses to breakdown.

I agree. That's why I hate to see, when any horse breaks down on a synthetic track, the predictable few who sarcastically say, "I thought those surfaces were supposed to be safe?"