It’s hard, I know, looking out onto that Saratoga Race Course dirt and think anything but sunny things about it.
Fact is, the data is in, and dirt tracks must go.
Few sports have a tradition with deeper roots than horse racing. So if you change the racing surface — as several high-profile tracks once did — you fundamentally change the breed.
Or do you? All else being equal, if all surfaces are the same, then what does it matter that American Pharoah ran on dirt and his offspring will run on, say, Tapeta? Do you look back at Barry Sanders’ career and think more or less because he spent eight games a year playing on AstroTurf? And let’s not trivialize the damage that surface did to any number of football and baseball players.
Fact is, there’s an old guard in horse racing. (Isn’t there always an old guard?) And they like it a certain way. We race on dirt because we have stallions that make dirt runners who win dirt classics. Well, dirt is killing horses at a rate that far exceeds the synthetic surfaces.
Santa Anita’s deadly year is the tinder lighting up this debate.
“We’ve had all of this catastrophic publicity, this onslaught against our industry, and yet nobody is willing to recognize one of the most obvious things that we can do by conversion to safer surfaces,” said Bill Casner in a Louisville Courier-Journal story. “The data is there. It’s not speculation ... (But) we’ve always been an industry of ostriches. We bury our heads. We think these problems will go away.”
Burying its head in the sand is an apt metaphor for the racing industry in general. The ones that make the kind of island-buying money are the ones who breed these horses. That’s always been the case. And the fear, one speculates, is that a brilliant dirt stallion won’t translate into a producer of synthetic winners.
For years, synthetic tracks tended to favor closers, a more “grass-style” of running.
According to the C-J story, equine fatalities on synthetic tracks added up to 1.2 deaths per 1,000 starts. Grass was 1.47 and good, ol’ fashioned, American dirt was 1.97, nearly double the amount of synthetic surfaces.
Now, on its surface that doesn’t seem like much, but when you extrapolate that over 10 years, synthetic surfaces resulted in 2,031 fewer race-related deaths. That’s an equal number — if not way more — devastated owners and caretakers.
When the leading tracks — Keeneland and Santa Anita, namely — switched from dirt to synthetic, I’ll admit, playing and handicapping those tracks didn’t feel like real horse racing. But you know what? After enough repetitions, and watchiing enough replays, and giving the horses and the jockeys and the trainers enough practice, it’ll normalize. We as fans or horseplayers will get over it.
Yeah, the Blue Grass Stakes and the Santa Anita Derby and the Breeders’ Cup at Santa Anita when Raven’s Pass beat Curlin all felt cheapened and annoyingly un-handicap-able, but that’s because we’re messing around with all these different surfaces. Move to a universal “new dirt” and things will play out just like they have for decades over old dirt.
“We know Keeneland is run by a small group of powerful people that have stallions,” Casner told the C-J. “That was the reason Keeneland switched. They blamed it on the trainers. I talked to I don’t know how many trainers and I asked them if they’d been called in and interviewed. There wasn’t one. You couldn’t find one trainer — Charlie LoPresti, Nick Zito, Mark Casse — none of them were questioned on it. It was a spin they put on it so they could reconvert to dirt so that dirt stallions could have the advantage... In short, decisions in our industry never seem to be made in the best interest of the horse. They’re always made for individual agendas. And it’s catching up with us now. We’re fixing to lose our industry. And unless decisions are made that are in the best interest of the horse, we will lose it.”
Sad to think that the horse was always just a tool. Same goes for all professional athletes, but at least the labor relations in the major sports put a halt to the abject exploitation we saw before free agency and arbitration. But where’s the horse’s union? Sure, there are animal activist groups, but this issue is too layered to burn it all down, as the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals would want.
So what’s the solution? If the breeders worry about what synthetic surfaces will do to their studs, then maybe the industry needs to kick in a subsidy until the breed course-corrects itself. Let the grandfathered dirt stallions age out.
If we normalize every race surface with the same material, then what’s the hang up? The Derby will still be the best two minutes in sports. The average fan won’t know the difference. The seasoned one, sure, yes, she will pine for the days of dirt, but she’ll get over it.
This sport, in many ways is brilliant and fun. But in other ways it’s barbaric, brutal and backwards. Do we really need whips? Or can we teach our jockeys to be better riders in as they come up?
Get busy livin’, ‘cuz the horses are dyin’.
Brendan O’Meara is a freelance writer and author of Six Weeks in Saratoga. He lives in Eugene, Oregon. (@BrendanOMeara)
