Requiem for a Pea Patch
I first visited Ellis Park in August 2002, and it instantly became one of my favorite racing venues.
I offer the following, written in advance of the 2005 meet, as my obituary to a truly great place to watch the races: A salute to the Pea Patch.
Rush to Synthetics
I doubt it’ll surprise any regular readers that I’m pro-synthetics: Both Cushion Track and Polytrack have so far proved safer for horses than dirt at every track they’ve been installed, and I like the handicapping wrinkles synths introduce. But commenter JS makes a great point here that tracks are rushing to implement the surfaces without adequate review, especially since it’s become apparent that synthetics aren’t flawlessly fair and maintenance free. Hollywood’s Cushion Track came in for criticism this spring for changing consistency and causing soreness in horses as the wax coating wore away (DRF+) and Polytrack has demonstrated problems related to weather (LATG).
Now that Cushion Track and Polytrack have been installed in a number of tracks with varying climate and racing conditions, it wouldn’t hurt to slow down the synthetic revolution, collect some data, observe how the tracks change over time, and maybe focus on some of the other factors that contribute to injuries and breakdowns in racehorses.
JS notes a lack of turn-out time — year-round racing means year-round training for most horses — but an even bigger problem may be the rampant use of steroids. Trainer Michael Dickinson estimated that 95% of racehorses are on steroids during a Horseplayers Expo panel and there’s little evidence to contradict him. Steroids apologists point to the drugs’ many therapeutic uses (NY Daily News), yet that’s not how steroids are used on the backstretch — 95% of American racehorses are not off their feed. Rather, unraced two-year-olds as well as seasoned campaigners are given steroids long-term to build and maintain muscle mass, just like human athletes, and like humans, the practice makes horses more susceptible to joint and bone injuries. Synthetics may mitigate that susceptibility somewhat, but the surfaces aren’t a total answer to breakdowns.
Scheinman at Pimlico
A video treat, via Baloo of the Bug Boys:
Cushion Track Praise
“It will add some consistency that the two Los Angeles tracks have the same surface,” trainer John Sadler said. “Guys can train where they want to train. I think it’s a positive step.” … “I think most people are happy with the decision,” said Ed Halpern, executive director of the California Thoroughbred Trainers. “It’s better for the handicappers. Hopefully, with the surface, we’ll see an increase in the horse population over time.” (DRF)
It will be nice to have a somewhat consistent surface in SoCal, especially one that seems to play as fair as Hollywood’s Cushion Track, which hasn’t attracted the same sort of hand-wringing as Keeneland’s Polytrack surface.
Here’s what I like about synthetic surfaces, in addition to their apparent increased safety: Polytrack and Cushion Track let the true pace of a race play out. Horses with early speed, capable of outrunning rivals in every quarter, continue to win, just as they do on dirt tracks. But horses with early speed and no late kick or additional gears aren’t buoyed along in the stretch as they can be on a speed favoring dirt track (see: Pimlico, 5/19). The stalkers and closers can run their races. As a friend emailed the other day, “the advent of artificial tracks is going to make pace handicapping more relevant than ever.” It also makes class a significant factor again. After more than 25 years of speed dominance, that makes for some welcome changes in the handicapping game.
Weekend Notes
– A speedy Songster dazzled in his first start off a nine month layoff, wiring the Bold Ruler Handicap at Belmont in 1:08.8 (DRF) and earning a new Beyer high of 109 for the effort.
– Also at Belmont: Trainer Kiaran McLaughlin’s hot streak continued with second-time starter Daheer in the fourth, who paid $27.00 to win and was one of two longshots that jockey Alan Garcia brought home on Saturday. The other was career maiden Gold Pageantry, out of Howard Tesher’s barn, in the second, who finally found a field he couldn’t lose against and paid $35.60 to win. Daheer’s a full brother to Grade 1 winner Spun Sugar, who was retired early this year (NTRA). McLaughlin’s won with three of his last four starters and is now sitting on top of Belmont’s trainer standings with a 6-for-10 record since the meet’s opening.
– In the Hilltop Stakes, “Street Sounds essentially got paid for a one-mile workout at Pimlico on Saturday” (DRF). The Street Cry filly, coming off a dominating win at 9-1 in the Grade 2 Beaumont at Keeneland last month, was sent to post as the 1-5 favorite and earned a 94 Beyer.
– Slew’s Tizzy could be headed to the Belmont, following a 1 3/4 lengths win over a sloppy track in the Lone Star Derby (Blood-Horse).
– At Hollywood, Sunday: Longshot Ashley’s Kitty came from off the pace and three wide to win the Railbird Stakes, beating favorite Silver Swallow to the wire by a nose. The race was apprentice Joe Talamo’s third win of the day and his first graded stakes score. Sindy With an S, coming off an allowance win and getting her first big class test, dueled with Storm Queen for the early lead as the two set fast, fast fractions of :21.61 and :43.98 for the first half. Sindy With an S finished third; Storm Queen faded badly to sixth.
Aqueduct, Saturday
All that’s great and terrible about racing was fully on display Saturday. The great, of course, was Horse of the Year Invasor overcoming a troubled trip to win the Donn Handicap by two lengths. The terrible was the ugly accident in Aqueduct’s fifth that left two horses dead and one jockey injured.
Every breakdown is shocking, but Cadillac Cruiser’s was especially disturbing. A 5-year-old gelding with a record of 15-6-3-0, Cadillac Cruiser was running for $7500 three weeks after finishing fifth as the favorite in a $25,000 starter handicap. He’d won at the same level two weeks before and won a $35,000 claimer five weeks before that. On Saturday, though, he was running for a fifth of his value. The connections were offering what looked like a competitive horse at a rock-bottom price, and the reason for that was suggested by the front bandages Cadillac Cruiser showed up in the paddock wearing for the first time in all his starts in trainer Rene Araya’s barn: The gelding was sore or getting there, and owner and trainer wanted to unload him fast.
That Cadillac Cruiser would break his right front leg and fall in front of the pack going around the clubhouse turn and that another horse, Jimmy O, would fall over him, dying instantly of a broken neck, was hardly the guaranteed outcome of his starting on Saturday, but it also wasn’t an entirely unpredictable risk. If any good can come of Saturday’s sad spectacle, let it be that track officials and vets ask more questions when horses drop so precipitously in class and that such horses are given more pre-race scrutiny.
Small Change, Big Difference
There’s something different about Santa Anita’s saddle cloths this year:
The numbers are strikingly sharp and legible. Slightly larger than those on most saddle cloths and in a typeface that’s crisp and heavy, the numbers are now much easier to pick out while watching races, even when the field’s running down the backstretch.
Weeks Have Passed
Since I last posted, but I have a great excuse: A new job, at a certain racing publication, for which I and the racing companion must relocate to New York in a few days. So, things have been busy around here, although time was found this weekend for a visit to a muddy, messy Suffolk Downs on Saturday:
And a quick trip to Saratoga, where I watched horses work in the fog Monday morning:
Regular posting will resume, eventually. In the meantime, I highly recommend my fellow TBA bloggers and an exciting new venture from Alan of Left at the Gate: Racing Saratoga.
Paying for Housing
I lived in one of the backstretch dorms at Saratoga last summer, sharing a 9 x 11 room with two other women. We kept our cramped room tidy — there wasn’t enough space for anyone to get messy — but the common areas of the dorm quickly fell into filth. Muddy puddles stagnated in the moldy shower room. Trash overflowed the too small buckets placed in the bathrooms, and the toilets clogged so often that people threw their used tissue into stall corners rather than risk flushing (until the cleaning crew started leaving a plastic bag in the corner, which made the situation slightly more tolerable). The cleaning staff came intermittently — there were times they would come two or three days in a row and then then they wouldn’t come for another three or four days. The women’s dorm was also unsecured, and it wasn’t unusual to step out of the bathroom and find a man lurking in the hall.
Unfortunately, those unclean and unsafe conditions aren’t limited to the Saratoga backstretch. So, that Barbaro’s owner Gretchen Jackson is even bringing the issue up is a good thing — backstretch workers deserve safe, well-maintained housing — but Jackson is very, very wrong about who should be reaching into their wallets to pay for this housing:
“This needs to be brought out, not with the wagging of fingers at people, but more like, ‘Look what’s happening,’ ” Jackson said. “If everybody who went to the track reached in their wallet and spared five dollars instead of placing a bet and put it in for new living quarters for grooms.”
Why should bettors, who already provide for little things like purses by wagering, donate to the cause of better backstretch housing? While I’m sure many would if appealed to, housing really isn’t their concern. Those who most directly benefit from the cheap labor provided by backstretch workers — owners, trainers, and tracks — are the ones who should be reaching into their wallets and sparing some money for decent accommodations. And there should be finger wagging, lots of finger wagging: Racetrack executives should be ashamed of the barely habitable living conditions offered on many backstretches, and trainers and owners should be ashamed that the hotwalkers and grooms who labor seven days a week year round caring for their animals often live worse than those animals.
Jackson, much to her credit, has been using her recent media prominence to speak up about some of the darker issues that haunt racing — not just backstretch conditions, but horse slaughter.
Quiet, and Kind of Creepy
In other words, a typical weekday at the track:
I went out to Bay Meadows recently — my first visit to a track in years, I admit — and things were so sedate I thought I’d lost my hearing. Most bets are placed at electronic touch screens now, so there were no wishful last words or giddy collection scenes at the windows, no general clamor or charge. It was more like some horse-theme mall, with gift shops and ATMs. What I took to be Bay Meadows habitues were seated at long tables near a vacant bar in isolated cones of silence, like men at an old porno movie house, their glazed eyes trained on banks of television screens that relayed the labors of horses at distant tracks — Hollywood Park, Belmont, Churchill Downs.
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Jessica Chapel is a writer, editor, and web producer living in Cambridge, MA. Railbird is a thoroughbred horse racing blog published continuously since June 2004. More ›
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