Quote:
Originally Posted by airford1
I remember that the synthetic tracks were hailed as the future of the sport by some only to produce higher rate of soft tissue injuries. Made some money when horses that were working on Hollywoods Cushion track would come to Santa Anita. A lot of winners with that angle, but then again they were not on to the Milk shake yet.
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I have a particular take on soft tissue injuries, as a litigation lawyer.
In human accidents, soft tissue injuries are where a vast number of fraudulent claims are made. You can't prove anything. If the victim tells a doctor he or she hurts there, and the doctor puts a brace on, boom, you have a soft tissue injury and a $25,000 or more claim.
There were a lot of trainers who hated synthetic tracks, for their own reasons. And, honestly-- and I am going to be very nasty to them-- they really didn't care that much about the fatality rate on dirt, at least in the sense that they would prefer a world where they understand the surface and speed figures work and their horses are bred to run on the surface, to a world where they are dealing with something new and unpredictable, even if that new and unpredictable surface is far safer.
There's no reason we should particularly credit the honesty of horsemen claiming soft tissue injuries. At any rate, even if you did, I'd rather have a racetrack full of treatable soft tissue injuries than a ton of fatal breakdowns. It's a no brainer.
