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Originally Posted by PaceAdvantage
Absolutely ridiculous. What would John Gaines be saying if her were alive to see this foolishness?
They are going to completely destroy the spirit of the Breeders' Cup. Half of what made it interesting was that it WAS held at a different venue every year.
If the BC and the NTRA feel this strongly about these UNDER-PERFORMING synthetic surfaces, I dare them to MANDATE surface changes for EVERY TRACK IN THE UNITED STATES.
Let them strip their little "safety badges" from EVERY TRACK that does NOT comply, and find a way to impose serious punitive damages on top of that...if they truly believe the only emphasis is on safety and they truly believe these artificial surfaces are all they were promoted to be...this should be priority number one.
Question: Why do horses continue to break down in high profile races over these synthetic tracks?
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What is frustrating to me is that there's not a single journalist out there who won't stick his neck out by asking the pertinent questions regarding what is going on with the Breeders' Cup and synthetic surfaces.
Remember, Dickinson had been hawking his surface for probably 15 years but no one would buy. When Keeneland becomes the NA distributor of Polytrack, suddenly it's declared the sport's savior, installed at Keeneland and Turfway, and then the terrible error of installing it in CA was made.
Who owns Keeneland and stands to benefit financially from the move to synthetic surfaces? Contrary to popular belief, Keeneland, while it was initially created as a non-profit, is not a non-profit, but is a privately owned track, controlled by a group of 3 men, one named Farish.
The Breeders' Cup, controlled by Farish, decides to hold its BC at a track with no dirt track, and for the first time declares that they had to go ahead and award the same track a consecutive year. That isn't believable.
There are those at the BC who are very much trying to force synthetics down our throats by putting the BC on synthetics (not as if anyone with a lick of sense couldn't see that), and Steve Crist reported that as late as last year, despite all the protests from horsemen, owners and fans, they talked about making it mandatory that any future BC site have a synthetic surface.
Now they're using another ploy, saying that we need to have the BC permanently at Santa Anita for marketing purposes and to grow revenue. Again, not believable at all, not when we know that Churchill Downs does the best job at hosting the event, not when we know that their real reason is the surface.
And finally, there's the injury reporting project, controlled by the Jockey Club. Everyone's been waiting to hear the results of how synth compares to dirt, and the results of the injury reporting project are no doubt going to be used to trumpet the case of one camp or the other. The data has been available since Nov. 1, but it wasn't released as promised in the middle of Nov (conveniently after the BC). We get into March, and it still wasn't released. They finally last week released one and only one stat -- the overall on-track mortality rate. No breakdown between dirt and synth and turf, though that's certainly as easy to obtain as the mortality rate over all 3 surfaces.
When can we expect the release of this data? Would anyone care to bet that it will be after April 22, when the BC announces their decision to go to SA permanently?
That's if it's released at all. Back in the mid-90s, there was a similar injury reporting project which released a pretty extensive report of its pilot period results. After getting its first full year's of results together, it was handed over to the Jockey Club, who again controlled the release of all data from the study. Despite repeated requests from the press, the JC never would release the data, and has never released it to this day.
Let me point out one more curiosity. Dr. Scallay reported the pilot results of the current project at the AAEP meeting two summers ago. One would think that if you're presenting data of a project that racing is holding as quite important that you'd be quite sure you're presenting the correct data.
At the AAEP meeting, in front of all her collegues, Dr. Scallay reported that the fatality rates on dirt and synth were virtually identical.
Within the week, a press release was issued that said Dr. Scallay was mistaken, and that the synth rates were actually lower than the dirt rates.
Something really, really stinks in all this, and I'm surprised by those who don't smell it.
