Re: Another View of Modern Racing From Bobby Trussell (554 Views)
Posted by:
fkach (IP Logged)
Date: October 05, 2007 10:57AM
There is probably NO way to prove this kind of thing.
Even if we had perfectly reliable cushion depth information for every track, we don't have moisture content and other relevant data.
For example, anyone that has ever been to the beach knows that sand gets harder and faster when you add water.
So how do we know whether some of today's sandier surfaces are slower and softer than the old clay ones even if they are deeper when the trucks are out there watering the surface every couple of races and they are constantly rolling it?
The same kind of thing is also true of turf.
Regardless of whether the turf surfaces are allowed to get softer now than in the past (I don't know), there are other complicating issues. Turf racing is much more popular now than it was 30 years ago. The pool of turf horses is probably a lot larger as a result. So if the best turf horses are in fact faster, it may have nothing to do with the changed breed, drugs (which seem to be less effective on turf anyway), or training methods. It may just be that there are more turf horses. So the top naturally gets better (the same is not true of the overall horse population in the US).
The bottom line is this is mostly intellectual conversation.
If horses are getting faster, they aren't doing it fast enough to impact figures from a single year to the next. So handicappers have almost nothing to worry about.
If the surfaces are causing problems by being too hard, then they should be softened regardless of what they were like in the past.
If you are intellectually curious about the progressively faster figures, I think there's no way to "prove" the point. There's just some evidence to evaluate. If you are an experienced figure maker, then you can evaluate the methodologies also.