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Originally Posted by pmayjr
Guys... in the bend it's gonna take years of speculation, denails, and trends to truly see if Poly is any safer than dirt. I'm still drinkin the kool aid right now that the stuff is safer.
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Where are you getting your information? It's not going to take years to figure out if it's safer. They already know that it's safer. It's not rocket science to see how your horses come back every morning. Over the polytrack, the horses come back in good shape every morning. They come back and their legs are cold and tight. There's not any doubt that it's much safer. The horses are staying so much sounder that field size is already increasing quite a bit. Even at Hollywood this meet, the average field size has gone up by about one horse per race. That's already a big improvement.
The main problem with polytrack is that there are still a lot of things that they don't know about it. They really don't know that much about how it will hold up and perform under different conditions. They really don't know that much about the best way to maintain it under different conditions. They are kind of just going by trial and error right now.
Anyway, we know that polytrack does well in moderate conditions but based on the issues at Woodbine and Turfway, maybe polytrack does not hold up that well in the extreme cold. Maybe they need to tweek the ingredients a little bit for tracks where the weather is really cold.
Polytrack is still a brand new thing. I'm sure there will be some problems with it here and there but I don't think the problems will be anything that they can't deal with. Just because there will be some minor problems here and there, it hardly means that polytrack is dead. Quite to the contrary, most trainers think it's the future of racing.
Here is what a trainer at Hollywood Park told me the other day when I asked him about some of the minor problems with the track over at Hollywood. He said, "When the cushion-track at Hollywood is at its worst, it's still better than the surface at Santa Anita at it best."
So despite some of the problems they have had with polytrack, overall the owners and trainers are very happy with it. If you want to call polytrack "an experiment", the experiment has gone very well so far despite a few bumps in the road. In other words, people in the industry are more confident now in polytrack, than they were a year or two ago. You guys are totally misreading the situation if you think that polytrack has not been a big success so far. Overall, people are extremely happy with it. In fact, it has been recieved so well thus far, that more and more tracks are now planning on putting it in. As you have heard, Arlington is probably going to put it in.