Posted: Thursday, September 10, 2009 12:17 PM

Equine fatalities tarnish otherwise successful Del Mar meet

by Steve Schuelein

The good news at the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club meet this year was that daily average attendance and handle figures increased with a shortened season of dates, but the bad news is that equine fatalities at the track also increased.

Reducing its meet to 37 days from 43 by eliminating Monday dates and cutting back to a five-day week for the first time since World War II, Del Mar showed a fractional 0.3% in daily average total handle to $13,040,206 and a 7.4% increase in daily average on-track attendance to 17,181.

“In this economy, when everybody else is down 10%, even looks pretty good,” Del Mar President Joe Harper said. “Thirty-seven is better than 43. It was better received from the patrons, horsemen, and employees. When you do the math, you do better without Mondays. And we were able to add some races in other places.”

Tempering the enthusiasm for those gains were the 12 horse deaths on the track’s synthetic Polytrack surface, a 50% increase versus last year when there were eight such deaths and a 100% increase from the six deaths that occurred in 2007, the first year of Polytrack at Del Mar.

Eight of this year’s injuries occurred in the morning with four in the afternoon. A 13th fatality occurred during a turf race.

“Personally, I thought Polytrack performed well,” Harper said. “We have experienced differences from the first year to the second year to the third year and made some good adjustments this year with new equipment.”

Harper admitted that fine-tuning the synthetic remains a work in progress and that pleasing everybody is impossible with track surfaces.

“Next year, I’ve got to see what we’re dealing with before we do anything,” said Harper. “We want to find out if we have the right percentage of ingredients, such as rubber and wax. We’re planning a lot of meetings with trainers to let them know what we’ve learned. There are trainers who have no problem with the track, and there are trainers who hate it. The ultimate goal is to make it as forgiving as possible.”

Zensational, a three-year-old Unbridled’s Song ridgling who beat older horses twice when winning the Bing Crosby (G1) and Pat O’Brien (G1) Stakes for sprinters, was named Horse of the Meet in a media poll.

Joel Rosario won his first Del Mar jockey title with 55 winners while John Sadler repeated as leading trainer with 31 wins.

There will always be debates as to whether polytrack is better or worse for race horses in general. It’s interesting to see that over the course of a couple years, polytrack has not held up to its status as “the next best thing” in horse racing. There will always be accidents and incidents and euthanasia unfortunately. Being an equine professional myself, I have rode of many a synthetic track. I have always thought of the internal damage that might be caused by the solutions used in polytrack. There are no studies to date proposing the damage that might be caused to both horse and rider by the constant inhaling of polytrack and the respiratory system. This is what I think about. Will I get cancer by breathing in polytrack fumes for the many years I’ve worked in and around it? Just something to think about.