Breeders' Cup 2009: Polytrack in Your Face

The 2009 Breeders' Cup (BC) will be run on good 'ol polytrack at Santa Anita Park on November 6th and 7th and I can't wait. As of today, there have been 166 horses entered into the 14 races that make up this year's richest event in all of sports.

Owners like Jess Jackson are so sore about artificial racing surfaces that they won't run their star horses (Rachel Alexandra) because they're convinced that polytrack is the devil.

For some reason, certain owners and trainers seem to prefer avoiding polytrack altogether, hoping it will go away. I'm no genius, but maybe if these guys would commit to training their horses on the plastics, they could adjust their methods.

Or is polytrack such a mystery that one could never gain any insight whatsoever in an attempt to prepare a horse for a race on it?

Personally, when the races go off next weekend I'll focus on the fact that the horses we're seeing are "...the best, of the best, of the best, sir...with honors." Ever hear of the Bird boys, Mine That and Summer?

For the record, I don't think the jockeys really care what surface they race on, as long as they're racing and getting paid for it, so let's just cross them off the list.

Scratch the horses off the polytrack hater list too. They might boycott racing all dirt tracks if they found out that it's statistically safer per thousand starts from the gate to race over polytrack.

And any bettor who wines about trying to handicap over synthetic surfaces is nothing but a losing bettor.

The ironic thing is that the same bettors who hate polytrack complain that the longshots come in too often. Why would someone who is risking their own money be upset if the winning combinations paid out a higher rate than on dirt surfaces? How is that bad?

I'd go as far as to say that, in general, children would prefer that horses run over polytrack if they were privvy to how it is safer than dirt. My reasoning here being that children probably don't enjoy seeing thousand pound animals abruptly collapse and die in agony.

You have to wonder if Barbaro's injury would have still been lethal if it had occured on polytrack. And the same question applies to many, many others.

Let's just be clear that the core group of opponents to polytrack are the people with a lot of money at stake - not the everyday fans.

So, if you watch the BC next weekend and you're a regular horse racing fan like me who wants to see the sport made safer, make it a party.

Get a pinata and go nuts!

Celebrate the fact that for the second year in a row, we've brought the highest profile event in the sport to safer ground.