Poly Runners At Churchill Downs......
 

Now that CD will open today and handicappers are again faced with the question of what to do with horses that have run exclusively on Poly when form is good but the horse has never been on dirt.

Has there been enough time to make any suppositions about when you can play a poly horse on dirt at CD and when you should toss these horses due to patterns of predictable nonperformance because of distance or pedigree. I have read about everything I have been able to buy beg borrow or steal on this subject and the more I read the less clarity there is.

Does CD and it's longer stretch set up dirt routes of poly horses more like american turf racing where most route races are run at 3/4 speed until the last quarter when the race looks like Los Al racing. Do you feel less comfortable about trying to predict a poly/turf horse's performance when these horses enter a dirt route?

Is there more common performance with sprints as a poly sprint and a dirt sprint are perhaps more likely to have predictable outcomes but as races are lengthened the poly beast takes on a form of it's own with extremes of outcome that make players and their prowess as handicappers completely lost about how a race will be paced with the extreme of the thought being the Del Mar surface of last summer that started the push back from the California poly edict equaled only by the drainage enigma of Santa Anita this year.

Does anyone have a set of thoughts about how to play dirt racing with PP's that are predominantly poly races or have we identified another reason that players stay away because they didn't want to play poly and now they can't play dirt racing because the poly influence in the horses is too great?

the good thing with Churchill is that most of the horses do have some dirt pp's to go off of. because on the kentucky circuit, 2 of the 4 places (ellis as well) are dirt tracks. I tend to look at the pace of the races on the Poly. The races where they routed and went 25/50/117 i try and throw out, because those kind of trips dont happen hardly ever at CD. Not to mention Keeneland is one of the only places where a horse can win going 7 wide, and it really doesnt impress me.

i read yesterday that gayego had a gallop every so often over the dirt training course at hollywood (and we know how his dirt debut went)....i wonder if any of the others in the field, that haven't run a race over dirt, have done the same? anyone know?

Most of the horses that were training at Santa Anita, the begining of the year spent alot of training time on the inner dirt track because of the Cushion track drainage. Not the same as having dirt in your face though.

Bottom line is every horse is different and you can't make generalizations if you are backing short priced horses. You want to try to translate poly form to the dirt surface then demand the price to compensate for the unknown.

Just watch what happens with
preps and training if the syn. horses run well.

This should set up very interesting
for next year's preps. If the syn. horses
flop, giant declarations will be made.

Either way, I can see conclusions
drawn off of too little evidence.
Lots of races have been run,
but the stuff just has not been
around long enough for the solid
conclusions that will inevitably be
drawn.

Maybe Big Brown just cleans up
and no one will care.

I think Colonel John was working well on some kind of dirt training track at HWD.