In today’s eighth race at Churchill Downs, nine of the twelve horses have been scratched. It is a one-mile turf race for claimers. What’s up? I don’t see a lot of scratches in the other races.
Maybe footing, the soft turf got pretty torn up the last two days, they were calling it " loose" yesterday and mentioning some horses couldn’t get ahold of it, track would not have been able to fix that overnight…
Maybe the meet is wrapping up today and they are pulling out early.
Maybe they originally entered thus race but ran in earlier races.
Its not that unusual.
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Pretty sure they pulled the races off the turf, in which case I believe you are allowed to scratch without penalty most everywhere.
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Yes, that race came off the turf. So trainers who didn’t think their horses would do well on the dirt scratched. As Texarkana said, no penalty for a scratch when there’s a change of surface.
The CD meet isn’t ending, it’s just beginning. So trainers are probably hoping that they’ll get another shot at the grass in the next few weeks.
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So when you say, “came off the turf,” do you mean it was a turf race and now it’s a dirt race?
Yes. The stewards decided that the turf course wasn’t in good enough shape to race on. Usually that’s due to rain. Today I’d imagine it was due to wear and tear over the last two days.
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Yes. It was soft over the weekend and heavily used during the BC, and the inside is pretty tore up. They rolled it and will allow it to rest and hopefully firm up enough to use it again. From what I’ve heard, it’s pretty bad and they will move the rail out for the remainder of the meet, but who knows. Some of those track maintenance guys are really really good at what they do.
Unfortunately, the rain starts back up tonite with hard freezes by the end of the week so the Turf horses who hate the dirt may be in for a long wait. It’s too bad the meet didn’t wrap. Been a terrible year for rain around here…
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