Posted on Mon, Nov. 20, 2006
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Barbaro injury a `wake-up call'

By Mike Jensen
The Philadelphia Inquirer

(MCT)
PHILADELPHIA - Michael Dickinson, a champion horse trainer, quirky idea man and - maybe most important - inventor of a synthetic all-weather racing surface, gave a blunt assessment of the current landscape in horse racing.
"Barbaro was a wake-up call," Dickinson said, speaking at a recent industry seminar in Philadelphia.
The trainer was referring to Barbaro's bad step in the Preakness Stakes, which was nearly fatal. Horses have been taking them since they began taking steps. But this has become maybe the most famous misstep in modern American thoroughbred racing, in a year full of them. The result, Dickinson and others hope, could be Barbaro's greatest legacy. Some of the more tradition-rich racetracks in America have recently switched from dirt to synthetic race surfaces.
"We are hoping that the table turns very quickly and the dirt tracks become a thing of the past," said Kathy Anderson, an equine veterinarian whose racehorse clients included Barbaro.
Her words are echoed by Barbaro's trainer, Michael Matz: "Hopefully, in a couple of years, you're going to say, `I can't even believe we were running on dirt.' "
Around the country, more racetracks are starting to seriously think about such a conversion, including Philadelphia Park. Just the fact that equine safety was the subject of a forum at a seminar for simulcasting operators shows how seriously the issue is being taken within the industry.
Monday marked six months since Barbaro's catastrophic injuries in the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, which shined a light on a problem that has increasingly plagued horse racing.
At Del Mar, where "the surf serenely meets the turf" just north of San Diego, seven horses were euthanized in the first eight days of this summer's season.
At Arlington Park near Chicago, another showplace of the sport, 14 horses were put down in two months this year.
At the Breeders' Cup, billed as Thoroughbred Racing's Greatest Day, the lasting image Nov. 4 was of a fallen horse, the favorite in the Breeders' Cup Distaff at Churchill Downs, Pine Island, who had to be euthanized immediately after the race.
"No one is going to change the modern thoroughbred, so we need to change the racetrack," Dickinson, who trained 1996 and 1998 Breeders' Cup Mile winner Da Hoss, said of horses increasingly bred for speed.
Recently retired jockey Gary Stevens thinks breeding could eventually be affected.
"This may be the savior to racing here in America, given what we have seen in the brief introduction we have had so far from meets at Turfway Park, Keeneland, and now beginning at Hollywood Park," he told the Tim Wooley Racing Web site. "It seems to show that speed is not as important as stamina, and our overfocus on speed has not been good for racing."
A trend toward synthetic surfaces already was in full throttle before the Preakness. Last year, Turfway Park in Florence, Ky., had switched to Polytrack - a mix of polypropylene fibers, rubber and silica sand in a wax coating - just ahead of Keeneland, a hub of the sport in Lexington, Ky. In February, California mandated all its tracks switch from dirt to synthetic surfaces by the end of 2007.
If the studies keep showing the same safety trends, "I think we'll have this surface (within) five years," said Philadelphia Park racing secretary Sal Sinatra, who visited Keeneland last month.
The day he got to Keeneland, Sinatra said, it was raining hard and a turf race was switched to the Polytrack. "Nobody scratched," he said. "It was a full field. Everybody ran their race."
He remembers thinking to himself, "Boy, this is really strange."
On Polytrack, there are hardly any biases. Come-from-behind horses don't get dirt in their face. Some riders also believe that reducing injuries could cut down on the use of drugs used on horses, legal and illegal.
For his part, Sinatra wants to see how the surface holds up in all sorts of conditions. He said New Jersey officials also are looking into the synthetic surface, although it certainly wouldn't happen for next year's Breeders' Cup at Monmouth Park.
"I think California is a true test," Sinatra said.
The Daily Racing Form reported that a Polytrack surface installed at the Woodbine Racetrack outside Toronto has experienced increased kickback as the temperature has dropped. That brings up a largely unexplored issue, about the long-term effects for horses of breathing in the kickback from a Polytrack surface, even though there is far less kickback than on a dirt track.
At Hollywood Park over the weekend, training was suspended for a day and the races were delayed Sunday when some problems were detected with the synthetic Cushion Track after maintenance crews harrowed the track, which created dangerous ridges and may have caused a fatal injury during a morning workout.
Installing the surface at a racetrack costs an estimated $8 million. Having to close down the track for 12 weeks to put it in is an issue. But, Sinatra said, with slot machines coming to Philadelphia Park, resulting in increased purses, "once (Philadelphia Park's horsemen) see the larger purses, they might actually want to be closed for a period of time."
At Fair Hill Training Center in Elkton, Md., there has been a dirt surface and a wood-chip track. Barn owners decided to spend roughly $2 million on a conversion from the smaller wood-chip track to a Tapeta surface developed by Dickinson.
"You have the straight engineering aspect of it," said Anderson, who practices out of Fair Hill. "You won't have that change in weight-bearing surface, (a bad step) at the wrong place, wrong time. ... There's less wear and tear on the horses, less chance of a high-impact injury and less dependent on weather conditions."
"For whatever reason, the turf horses seem to handle it almost on a par with running on the turf," said Graham Motion, a Fair Hill-based trainer who had two second-place finishers in the Breeders' Cup, Better Talk Now in the Turf, and Film Maker in the Filly and Mare Turf.
"Therefore, when the races come off the grass, you can run them anywhere and not worry about it. Certainly at Keeneland, they never take races off the grass. This year, they did it on several occasions and everybody ran. That's huge for the whole game."
Asked about the possibility of local tracks such as Philadelphia Park and Delaware Park going to an all-weather artificial surface, Motion said, " They'd be foolish not to jump on the bandwagon. Delaware has struggled with their entries all year. It changes it around. All of a sudden, if they get a Polytrack surface, they become the track that everybody wants to run at. It's that simple, really.
"I can't believe it wouldn't be worthwhile for them to do it. They go from being a place that's struggling to fill the entries to a place where everybody is going to want to be."
"Bigger fields means bigger handles," said Matz, who conditioned Round Pond to a victory in the Breeders' Cup Distaff, becoming the first trainer since D. Wayne Lukas in 1999 to have a Kentucky Derby winner and a Breeders' Cup winner in the same year. "Bigger handle means more people coming out to watch the races. And eventually, more people go to the casino. I just wish they would look at it that way."
Delaware Park officials said they are closely monitoring the Polytrack situation. There is no expectation in the industry that Delaware Park would have a Polytrack as soon as next year.
Keeneland was a natural to try it early. "Keeneland was a notoriously bad surface, which was such a shame, because everything about Keeneland is so well done, except for they had this horrendous dirt track," Motion said.
In the first year of racing on Polytrack at Turfway, fatal injuries were reduced from 24 to three, with the number of starters up from 8,925 to 10,208. And Turfway's handle was up 62 percent. In a study commissioned by Turfway, 96 percent of the jockeys and 95 percent of the trainers felt Polytrack was safer than conventional dirt surfaces.
That doesn't mean "all horses like to race over it. "Wildcat Bettie B is a Grade I winner, (but) I don't think she's (just) a $5,000 horse over Polytrack," said trainer Larry Jones, who moved from Turfway to Delaware Park this year. "She can't even gallop over it. But she is the exception."
Jones added: "I don't know that 100 percent Polytrack is all the answer."
Matz worked Round Pond on Keeneland's Polytrack before the Breeders' Cup and wasn't hesitant to train Barbaro on that surface before the Kentucky Derby.
While he was at Keeneland last month, Matz saw "a lot of the horses who were running in the beginning of the meet, were running back two weeks later," he said. "Recovery time is a lot quicker."
Anderson, Barbaro's vet, believes that the colt, still at the University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center, is a powerful symbol because he was in such robust shape. "I know from personal experience, Barbaro was good as you're going to get," she said. "He was a sound, healthy, happy horse."
There are a lot of angles to consider - tracks in England tried a number of surfaces before hitting on the preferred one - but Motion said he sees one ultimate bottom line. He pointed to a newspaper on his desk at Fair Hill with a photograph of Pine Island off her feet rolling on her back during the Breeders' Cup. It was an image used in newspapers all over the country.
"Look," Motion said, "this is what we're trying to get away from."