Santa Anita- do you think somethings up?

[Palm_Beach]

[quote="“snaffle1987,post:73,topic:456065”]

@Pronzini

Trainers are not a monolithic group. They are 100+ individual small business people (and some not so small) which are situated out of the same racing “mall” if you will. They have different clients, financial and other pressures, horses and philosophies. I personally wouldn’t extrapolate across the board like that.

Secondly if I remember correctly, what Santa Anita did was close the track on virtually no notice when horsemen had already made up set lists for that day. These are athletes and you can’t just leave them in the barn. It was a really high handed tone deaf response from management.

QUOTE]

the inner training track was left open for their use on that day and the whined and cried like spoiled babies. I understand it shook up their original plans but if the decision was made for the safety of the horses and jockeys on the track; they should’ve understood. You can still get horses out onto the training track to jog and gallop for exercise. Maybe not timed work outs but you can do plenty of leg stretching trotting and galloping around the training track to get horses out of their stalls.

Sure, easy peasy. Having never worked on the track or observed training, you don’t know what it’s like taking however many horses at Santa Anita who train over the spacious main track and having them all train in extremely tight quarters on the much much smaller training track. I’m sure it was pretty crazy.

So how far down would you like them to dig up the track? Down to the base? Down to the sub base? Replace the sub base? Do you have any idea how many feet down race tracks go, and how much money will be needed to do this? Good grief, how you like to spend other peoples’ money.

As others have said, the problem needs to be identified in order to fix it. If they need to dig up the track, they’ll dig up the track. But I doubt that will be the starting point.

[Palm_Beach]

@snaffle1987

the inner training track was left open for their use on that day and the whined and cried like spoiled babies. I understand it shook up their original plans but if the decision was made for the safety of the horses and jockeys on the track; they should’ve understood. You can still get horses out onto the training track to jog and gallop for exercise. Maybe not timed work outs but you can do plenty of leg stretching trotting and galloping around the training track to get horses out of their stalls.

This recent shutdown has closed all of the tracks at SA and is probably affecting the horses more. This is why they are trying to open the training track tomorrow to allow horses to go out an exercise.

Sure, easy peasy. Having never worked on the track or observed training, you don’t know what it’s like taking however many horses at Santa Anita who train over the spacious main track and having them all train in extremely tight quarters on the much much smaller training track. I’m sure it was pretty crazy.

So how far down would you like them to dig up the track? Down to the base? Down to the sub base? Replace the sub base? Do you have any idea how many feet down race tracks go, and how much money will be needed to do this? Good grief, how you like to spend other peoples’ money.

As others have said, the problem needs to be identified in order to fix it. If they need to dig up the track, they’ll dig up the track. But I doubt that will be the starting point.

[Palm_Beach]

@TheMoo

@snaffle1987 I really feel you should lend your expertise to those who work at SA and to all the connections who lost horses. I mean you have all the answers and clearly you know how to fix it all and run a training program.

And also has a money tree!

[LaurieB]

Fwiw, we had horses racing at SA two winters ago. There was some bad weather (though nothing like this year) and the main track was closed for training on several occasions. As Palm Beach pointed out, the training track is much smaller and certainly not meant to handle that kind of traffic.

My trainer sent me a video of our horses waiting in line to get onto the training track. (Once the track was full, more horses were only allowed to come in when others left.) At the point she was filming, the line was half a mile long. :eek:

So it’s not just a matter of “if they cared, they would just use the training track”.

[Maythehorsebewithme]

@LaurieB

Fwiw, we had horses racing at SA two winters ago. There was some bad weather (though nothing like this year) and the main track was closed for training on several occasions. As Palm Beach pointed out, the training track is much smaller and certainly not meant to handle that kind of traffic.

My trainer sent me a video of our horses waiting in line to get onto the training track. (Once the track was full, more horses were only allowed to come in when others left.) At the point she was filming, the line was half a mile long. :eek:

Thanks for that info! Who knew? That is astonishing!:eek::eek::eek:

[Where_sMyWhite]

@Pronzini

I don’t speak for them. I don’t know what their thought process was. However before I judge someone, I hope that I put what they do in context. I don’t know what the horse population is right now at Santa Anita but it’s probably 1500 or so. The vast majority of those horses go to the main track daily even if they only work weekly. Maybe they didn’t think the problem was that bad. Maybe their barn by quirk of fate wasn’t affected. It takes a certain competitive mindset to be a racehorse trainer and part of that is often that trainers universally think that they are that much better than everyone else. That can lead to blindspots if you take it far enough. (And it is not like there were zero breakdowns before Christmas. That is not the nature of this game unfortunately).

Pronzini, one of the posts implied that trainers felt there were “issues” even before the fatality count became so public. Don’t know if that is true or not.

I absolutely would not attempt to second guess someone else’s decision without at least trying to understand.

Yup, most horses train and come back safely. Was more rhetorically wondering if there was a sentiment in the backstretch that there were “problems” with the main track what would drive a trainer’s decision to main track or training track (since yeah the horses have to get out). Yup, that training track is tiny compared to the main track (given the training track is inside the turf course which is inside the training track).

This meet opened December 26 so yes, after Christmas

[jolise]

There has been soooo much rain in SoCal this winter. I cannot recall it raining this much in the past. I did not notice an issue with the track until around 2/14 when it rained non-stop. They really should have cancelled the race card that day. The fields scratched down to 4 horses in some races. Many were hoping that management would cancel, but they chose not to. My trainer had 4 horses entered that day and scratched them all due to track condition. He has been using the training track in the mornings for the last month or so due to condition of the main track. It seems to be the weather and losing Dennis Moore in December. Hopefully, they can get it resolved soon.
In the meantime, the training track has not had issues thus far and they will be using it in the mornings at least for jog and gallops.
I wish they had addressed it sooner. It does not help that the press got a hold of it and now every time there is a breakdown it will be front page news. And even on a good track, there will be breakdowns unfortunately.

[Palm_Beach]

@LaurieB

My trainer sent me a video of our horses waiting in line to get onto the training track. (Once the track was full, more horses were only allowed to come in when others left.) At the point she was filming, the line was half a mile long. :eek:

I can’t begin to imagine a half mile long line of patiently waiting race horses!!! Or being a free lance exercise rider…

[LaurieB]

@Palm Beach

I can’t begin to imagine a half mile long line of patiently waiting race horses!!! Or being a free lance exercise rider…

I was shocked at how patiently the horses were all standing there, waiting. The biggest problem was a personnel issue. The wait to get on the track turned out to be 45 minutes. So you had riders who were on the track–but their next set of horses needed to be in line to hold their place. If grooms held the horses, then who was prepping the set after that? Same with hotwalkers who needed to be back at the barns to grab incoming horses. It was a logistical nightmare.

I saw that SA is opening their training track for longer than usual training hours today. Hopefully that will smooth things along.

[Pronzini]

@Where'sMyWhite

Pronzini, one of the posts implied that trainers felt there were “issues” even before the fatality count became so public. Don’t know if that is true or not.

I absolutely would not attempt to second guess someone else’s decision without at least trying to understand.

Yup, most horses train and come back safely. Was more rhetorically wondering if there was a sentiment in the backstretch that there were “problems” with the main track what would drive a trainer’s decision to main track or training track (since yeah the horses have to get out). Yup, that training track is tiny compared to the main track (given the training track is inside the turf course which is inside the training track).

This meet opened December 26 so yes, after Christmas

Cassidy implied in his interview that his vet told him that injuries were up. I don’t know how that conversation came about but I can imagine. Cassidy lost Amboseli, a horse that he maintains was “totally fine” before the race. Amboseli was a Medaglia d’Oro mare who was graded stakes placed and went off as one of the favorites in a Grade 3. Some of the posts about this issue here and elsewhere imply that trainers don’t care when horses break down – they just move on to the next one.

FWIW, that is not my experience, especially for a mare like Amboseli who ran for Cassidy’s biggest client DP Racing. But does that lead to town crier stuff where the trainers pool information? Not necessarily because again they are competitors.

But each trainer’s barn is like a canary in a coalmine since even the turf horses use the main track to train. So if the trainer sees a spike of injuries in his or her barn combined with a siren that keeps going off at Clocker’s Corner and vans pulling horses off the track daily in the morning and the afternoon, there might be some talk. But horses get hurt and I mean all of them to some degree or another. A big part of a competent trainer’s job is managing injuries and condition. So is that knee injury because of a bad part of the track or because horses get knee injuries? That might not be as cut and dried as implied by the rhetoric around this.

But deaths should all be subject to necropsies which in turn should be reviewed by the regulators. That is the oversight built into the system and not the individual trainers even if they suspect something is not right.

[Where_sMyWhite]

Pronzini, I know that most trainers (and connections) care about the horses in their care.

Seen the emotion when a loved horse is lost and I know they aren’t thinking about lost money…

Gotta be tough to be a trainer in a situation like SA. Train? How hard? Which track? Race and take the risk? Is there really a problem with the main track? All these thoughts rolling around in their head as they make decisions. I know the trainers are competitors but are they (I don’t know) that much of a competitor that if they thought there was a problem they wouldn’t be informally chatting with other trainers?

I know horses will get injured or breakdown… the nature of the animal in a high speed game. We have enough data now to know what should be normal stats. When there is a spike, that should set off the spidey sense that something is up.

I hope they are able to get to the bottom of the problem and address it (rather than… looks okay we couldn’t find anything wrong).

That first breakdown (and it will happen at some point unfortunately) after they return to racing will be tough. Normal or still a problem?

So interesting for me to get more insight into racing, training, behind the scenes as at were. Thank all of you for sharing that. I learned long ago that for many things, I try not to Monday morning quarterback any decision until I learn more about what’s going on rather than just what the media releases right off the bat.

[Palm_Beach]

A big problem is that each state is like it’s own little racing silo, and information is not shared between states. KY’s fatalities were up in 2018. Offhand, I don’t know if any other state or track had a spike.

I strongly feel that the EID should be evaluated at the very least monthly so corrective action could be taken when a negative trend is spotted.

It is quite possible that other states and tracks also have an increase in fatalities, although not as dramatic as SA. And maybe it’s regional and weather related. SA’s spike absolutely has to be weather related.

Too many different trainers are involved for the spike to be drug related, and I don’t think any one trainer has more than 2 fatalities. And with some SA trainers having multiple strings at various locations, you’d also see deaths for that trainer at other locations IF a trainer was using some new concoction.

SA also has 5 turf fatalities, which are largely being ignored. I think that is a lot for the turf.

I think they also need to bring in some kind of geologist who can look at the Santa Anita property and see if there has been some kind of change that is outside the expertise of the track specialist.

[mommy_peanut]

https://www.bloodhorse.com/horse-racing/articles/232442/santa-anita-to-institute-enhanced-protocols-procedures

[Palm_Beach]

What they really need is less racing, or more horses.

[TCA_Arabians]

A status update from today’s LATimes:

https://www.latimes.com/sports/more/la-sp-santa-anita-racing-deaths-20190309-story.html

[Palm_Beach]

This article by Natalie Voss has some great information regarding the suspicions surrounding the fatalities.

https://www.paulickreport.com/news/ray-s-paddock/santa-anita-breakdowns-your-questions-answered/

[TCA_Arabians]

This is an op-ed from today’s LATimes:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-smiley-racehorses-20190310-story.html

[TheMoo]

@TCA Arabians

This is an op-ed from today’s LATimes:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-smiley-racehorses-20190310-story.html

:rolleyes:

[LaurieB]

@TCA Arabians

This is an op-ed from today’s LATimes:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-smiley-racehorses-20190310-story.html

I’m sorry to see Jane Smiley given any kind of a platform to talk about horse racing.

[TCA_Arabians]

Palm Beach - Thank you for that link to the Paulick report. I definitely learned a few things about my long-held beliefs on growth plates and when to start training. Course, I’m out of the training game now but it’s still good to learn something.

All the results aren’t in. I do think the one obvious factor is the above-average amount of rain we’ve had here. As mentioned previously in this thread, the south facing slopes here have really been hit. Santa Anita is right at the base of those slopes.

Thank again for the link. Whether racing or other pursuits - that article has good information for horse owners.