A Championship-Worthy Surface?

A permanent surface - or home - for the Breeders’ Cup? Almost as hot as the Zenyatta v. Rachel Alexandra debate (which, quite frankly, seems to be settling into a demand that both receive shared Horse of the Year honors), is the question of the synthetic course of Santa Anita, and Joe Drape's suggestion in The New York Times that it become the permanent home of the travelling championship series.

In the photo, European-trained Man of Iron edges out American entry Cloudy's Knight in the Breeders' Cup Marathon.

Santa Anita, the beautiful Art Deco racing palace in Arcadia, California, has played host to several Breeders’ Cup Championships, including the two most recent years’ events. The southern California audience is always appreciative of good horses; the weather is, climatologically speaking, fantastic for horses; and the Oak Tree Racing Association, whose racing meet hosts the two-day event, have proven to be valuable partners to the Breeders’ Cup organizers.

And despite two beautiful days of horse racing, the stands packed with frenzied fans and horseplayers (more than a few packing colorful signs urging on racing’s own Hollywood star, Zenyatta), critics still point to Santa Anita’s Pro-Ride synthetic track surface and say, “No good.”

The casual observer would say that it is hard to argue with the numbers. The most recent study of racing fatalities in California shows synthetic tracks, in place since 2006, standing at 1.70 per 1,000 starts, versus 3.09 per 1,000 starts on the old dirt courses.

In other words: in about one thousand races, one horse less will die on a synthetic track, than on a dirt track - a forty percent decline.

But this is the horse business, where old habits die hard, and in fine stables you will still find that used motor oil is the hoof dressing of choice, or that pressing hot needles into damaged shin bones is considered an acceptable remedy for rapid healing and bone growth. You can argue that motor oil is a carcinogen and ought not be rubbed into a horse’s coronary band, where it will surely be absorbed into the circulatory system. You can argue that pin-firing is an obsolete method of counter-irritant and possibly even that bucked shins are not a necessary right of passage for a horse entering hard training, but a sign that the bones were green and unprepared for the workout. You can argue it, but will anyone listen? For those who are convinced, there is no turning back.

In The New York Times, Hall of Fame trainer Richard Mandella sums up the synthetic track argument: “It’s like gun rights. You have people deeply opposed on either side and no conversation is going to change minds.”

It’s a striking feature of American racing, this obsession with dirt, even as two hundred years of racing has made little difference in the safety of the surface. And its argued inadequacies always seem to show up just when thoroughbred enthusiasts think that they’ve got a home run, a real star, to captivate the television audience and bring them back begging for more.

In 2007, horseracing fans roared home Curlin, the eventual Horse of the Year and winner of the Dubai World Cup, as he crossed under the wire in the Breeders’ Cup Classic at Monmouth Park in New Jersey. Curlin, a flashy chestnut colt, had achieved fame already in his gutsy stretch battle - and loss - to tough filly Rags to Riches in the Belmont Stakes. He was the kind of horse you could pin up a poster of. Here was a good-looking colt to snag those horse-crazy girls while they were still young and impressionable!

As Curlin walked into the Winner’s Circle, a dirt champion for his owner, the adamantly anti-synthetic Jess Jackson, a horse named George Washington was quietly euthanized on the backstretch, ankle broken.

To follow up the death of George Washington with two injury-free, fatality-free years at Santa Anita ought to have placed favor purely in the synthetic camp. As written by Julian Muscat in The Independent (U.K.) two years ago, "A fatality-free renewal would surely represent the last rites for traditional dirt. The Breeders' Cup, already creaking from international competition, can ill afford another scene that saw Curlin's connections celebrate their triumph while George Washington lay prostrate in the shadows.”

There are, of course, other variables in the accomplishment of Santa Anita’s tragedy-free Breeders’ Cup weekends. Significantly, there is the drug and steroid ban, which has grown in power and size, to emulate the more stringent rules of European racing. All the 2009 winners would eventually test clean.

But the synthetic surface can also lay claim, many contend, to the rising number of European entries - and winners - at the Santa Anita editions. In 2008, they won five of the fourteen championships, and in 2009, they won six.

One of the biggest surprises and longest shots of the weekend, Vale of York, came bounding up in an out-of-nowhere nose to win the Juvenile, and many are attributing his promising win to training on synthetic tracks at home in - where else? - Europe.

The Breeders’ Cup is one of the few days of racing that is televised on broadcast networks - second, of course, to the Triple Crown races, and the fatalities that have marred these three races, all run on dirt surfaces, are part and parcel of multiple arguments: the medication issue, the age issue, the breeding issue. The Triple Crown can keep all those issues, for now, as the New York Racing Association has announced that it has no plans to change any of its tracks, including the mile and a half oval at Belmont Park, from the traditional dirt to synthetic, and Churchill Downs has not committed to altering any of its tracks outside of Arlington, which converted to a synthetic surface, and so far has inconclusive data on reducing the break-down rate.

The Breeders’ Cup organizers, then, are left with this: after a quarter of a century, it has finally become a truly international event, an affair that attracts the best horses in the world to the United States, to run against American horses on a level playing field. To achieve a beautiful, clean, safe event like the one run this year, they had to go to Europe for the best practices in drug bans, in testing, and, one can argue, in surfaces. That they achieved a fair surface for European horses to compete with American horses is undeniable. Can they achieve a fair surface for American horses? Not, it would seem, until the synthetic nay-sayers can be convinced that the tracks across the country can be better, safer places for horses to run on.