NH 2010-2011: Weather Watch

Jumping on Polytrack...

Very little to argue with there, Jon. The Equitrack experience did put a lot of people off the idea of any kind of jumping on an artificial surface and that legacy, like many attitudes within racing, is proving hard to shift.

My personal view is that Kempton would be a better starting point for a Polytrack NH trial than Lingfield given the track configuration but I'm not opposed to Lingfield staging hurdling on the Polytrack at all.
 
The opinion of trainers such as Philip Hobbs is that poly/fibresand is fine for schooling, but that horses won't slide/roll on it when falling, meaning that falls are always liable to cause injury, and falls are clearly much more likely at racing pace.
 
It appears snow in Ireland has left the rescheduled cards at Navan and Fairyhouse in doubt over the weekend according to the RP.

Neil Mackenzie-Ross is making optimistic noises about Lingfield on Saturday but I think there needs to be serious improvement for the meeting to go ahead.
 
Rory, you can tumble during schooling, too. Horses, as I've tried to say, haven't been sliding on the grass, either. If you're going to fall on your head and break your neck it won't matter whether you fall onto soft grass or not. I imagine we know that falls can cause injury, but I'd argue that they're more likely just because of pace. We've surely all witnessed enough legless animals being forced to climb over the last fence, only to have a 'tired fall' on the other side? At the pace they're going by then, most of us could scoot past them with a wheelbarrow on our backs. Hobbs's comments don't do it for me - he must've put his ponies over hurdles at pace at some point and found that the artificial surface is perfectly fine, or else he'd be risking jarring and stress fractures. I wouldn't touch Fibresand, though.

Stodgers, I'm very doubtful of us staging the NH card on Saturday. He hasn't put down any sheeting and there would be a huge area to clear - you can see piles of snow holding fast where the groundsmen haven't been able to clear other than the absolute necessity of space for the three punters who appeared to attend today. (Nice - I didn't even know we had a meeting there today! Just shows what being off for a couple of meetings does - they forget all about you!)
 
Very fine, light snow in Cheltenham yesterday evening, but no snow outside the main part of town. Very strange to drive out of a fine mist of snow, a small patch of clear air, then into a freezing fog that lasted from the roundabout at the racecourse all the way out into the country.

Put cat out last night at 9.00 and everything was white. Thought it had snowed but on going out this morning found that it was a very hard frost. Surprisingly, the roads were okay.

It did look very beautiful, but bitterly cold.

Passing Sainsbury's on the way to work, there is a thermometer outside which showed -7 degrees. On the way home at 4.00 this evening it read -9.

On reading the Cheltenham home page they are confident that they will race both days. If you are going racing don't forget the thermals!
 
redhead said:
Very fine, light snow in Cheltenham yesterday evening, but no snow outside the main part of town. Very strange to drive out of a fine mist of snow, a small patch of clear air, then into a freezing fog that lasted from the roundabout at the racecourse all the way out into the country.

Put cat out last night at 9.00 and everything was white. Thought it had snowed but on going out this morning found that it was a very hard frost. Surprisingly, the roads were okay.

It did look very beautiful, but bitterly cold.

Passing Sainsbury's on the way to work, there is a thermometer outside which showed -7 degrees. On the way home at 4.00 this evening it read -9.

On reading the Cheltenham home page they are confident that they will race both days. If you are going racing don't forget the thermals!
Click to expand...

Thick mist saw everything get a thick covering of hoar-frost when the temps dropped. It all looks very picture postcardesque, but not promising in terms of racing, but there was a weekend thaw which allowed the covers to go down and they will stay there until Friday morning. Cross Country race is unlikely to go ahead though, imo.
 
Falls are due to any number of issues - pace alone isn't the criterion. Examples (which we've all witnessed):

Stupidity: asking a clearly desperately-tired animal for one more jump

Carelessness: not getting a clear sight for your horse at the jump

Accidental interference: someone crosses in front at take-off or on landing; barging, hanging

Brought down: fatals can occur because the horse in front falls and brings down your horse

Clipping heels: a firm favourite with AW sprinters, but beginning to find favour with numpties in 2m hurdles

Unsafe ground: slip-ups on the bend - these have on occasion done for some nice debut Bumper horses, in Ireland last year particularly

Insufficient prep: not schooling enough, the horse not confident, failing to stride into the hurdle/fence, hitting it, and falling

Inexperienced/overambitious jockey: asking too much - for too much speed into a fence, to be got out of trouble; failing to push on or pushing on too much (this could be endless, so I'll stop!)

Much of the above has nowt to do with speed at all. If you were slogging round four miles, you're not going more than 3/4 pace, and half the field isn't going to finish anyway. That would be perfectly acceptable - you're not even going the pace of an eventer, who'd be tackling giant log piles, Toyota pickups, jumps off ramps into lakes, and Christ knows what else.

I think we can get a bit precious about horses - if they're prepped properly (in the way that Shadow Leader, for example, would do), if they're ridden with both sides of the jockey's brain operating, then they really shouldn't experience any more difficulty with hurdling on Polytrack than they already do with grass.
 
krizon said:
Falls are due to any number of issues - pace alone isn't the criterion.
Click to expand...

No-one suggested it was. It is, however, the crucial factor when comparing schooling at half-speed and racing at pace. They clearly aren't comparable in terms of risk.
 
I'm actually trying to discuss the merits of hurdling on Polytrack, but if you're going to focus on falls, Rory, then there is no one factor, as I've pointed out. Look at the 300-400 fatal falls per year and tell me which were done at full speed - very few. The vast majority of every year's fatalities involve NH races, of which chasers, not hurdlers, are the most prevalent in getting killed (regardless of the going, regardless of their speed). I'm not proposing Polytrack for their events.

But as NH trainers are content to run their horses in Bumpers on Polytrack, some are happy to use it to punt their hurdlers over obstacles at home, and it's not been even trialled for racing, surely it isn't unreasonable to put forward the issue?

If you focus on fatal falls, you'll find that all but about three or four per year (on grass or not) were NH. So grass ain't savin' nuttin' - at any speed.
 
Last edited:
The merits of hurdling on polytrack are always going to be based around the issue of horse welfare, so it really is all about falls and the likelihood of those on an artificial surface being fatal. The "speed" issue seems to be confusing the matter - I'm saying that common sense dictates that a gentle schooling session is much less likely to be injurious to horses than a race, for many of the reasons highlighted, therefore the argument that it must be ok as trainers are happy to school on it simply doesn't hold water.

I'd also imagine that the surface used in most schools isn't polytrack at all, but something more like fibresand, and we seem to be in agreement that fibresand is a no-go. Similarly, most NH trainers are delighted to run their bumper horses on fibresand, as the Southwell card yesterday amply demonstrated.

Your argument that grass is no safer is a total non-sequitur
 
Your argument is that Polytrack would be unsafe. I've said that grass is no guardian (in preventing the fatal falls you keep going on about). That's not a non sequitur - it's fact.

Can you advance this discussion, Rory, without obfuscating the issue by talking about 'gentle schooling sessions' - you have actually been out on gallops? Tell me what's 'gentle' about them. You don't get a horse attacking his obstacles - hurdle or jump - by 'gentle' schooling under the saddle. I'd be concerned if some practice work wasn't taken at 3/4 speed in order to give the horse confidence in attacking. Titting about with obstacles would be a sure way to make the horse hesitant and that certainly wouldn't be the optimum operating condition.

Some gallops are sand and artificial mixes, some are sand and woodchip, some are all woodchip (how's that for practising your hurdles on?), some expensive ones are Polytrack, and some are plain grass with varying levels of firmness throughout the year. Horses are galloped on all of these and while there are naturally fewer falls when there aren't any obstacles in the way, there are, as we know, still fatal injuries while working.

The merits of hurdling on Polytrack would be no different to the merits of hurdling on grass, surely? Where's the issue of welfare when horses are killed every week falling on grass or just plain snapping their legs on it? Grass can't assume some superior survivability when the alternative hasn't even been trialled. It's just that no-one's got the cojones to try Polytrack and the BHA gives a reactionary shudder at the thought of it. We have miles of excellent, standard surfaces going to waste through the winter when we could be using them to keep NH going in a limited way.

I don't think chasers would be any worse off jumping into soft, deep-harrowed Polytrack than they are on all the other turf conditions they're presented with in what is now an all-year activity when it's too frosty/snowy/soggy/foggy. You cannot seriously posit that thumping down with 11st on your back onto ground that doesn't give an inch - but is covered in 'traditional' grass during summer jumping - is more humane that sinking two inches into standard-prepared Poly? I think horse welfare would be better served by the artificial surface, don't you?
 
Last edited:
Weather News...

Huntingdon's card, featuring the Peterborough Chase, has been moved to Sunday.

Doncaster inspect at noon but prospects don't look encouraging. No news yet on an inspection for Lingfield's NH fixture on Saturday.
 
What was the last NH meeting run in GB and Ireland? What's is the record for most days without a NH meeting during the main season?
 
krizon said:
Your argument is that Polytrack would be unsafe. I've said that grass is no guardian (in preventing the fatal falls you keep going on about). That's not a non sequitur - it's fact.
Click to expand...
My argument isn't that polytrack is unsafe. Many trainers (I quote Philip Hobbs as he was interviewed about this recently) feel that all artificial surfaces are safe to jump out of, but very dangerous to fall on, as indeed was the conclusion of most people when the original experiment was abandoned first time around. You feel that polytrack would be safer than equitrack, but the only way of testing that would be to allow horses to fall on it at speed and see if they died, which is hardly the kind of trial the BHA are going to sanction.

You haven't presented any facts about the safety, or lack thereof, of falling on turf. Your argument is that most fatalities on turf come in jump races, therefore turf isn't safer than polytrack. That is, as I said, a non-sequitur. It may well prove to be true, but it is in no way a logical argument

If most jumps trainers wanted jumping on the AW, then we would possibly see its return, and there's no reason why anyone would want to avoid it just to pander to the opinions of others, so you may assume that it is considered to be a bad idea (rightly or wrongly) and there's no point banging the drum to bring it back.
 
In Australia do they not have hurdle races on polytrack but have turf either side of the obstacles?
 
rorydelargy said:
Thick mist saw everything get a thick covering of hoar-frost when the temps dropped. It all looks very picture postcardesque, but not promising in terms of racing, but there was a weekend thaw which allowed the covers to go down and they will stay there until Friday morning. Cross Country race is unlikely to go ahead though, imo.
Click to expand...

Cheltenham town had a bit more snow last night, there was about 1/4 inch on the pavement outside the Hospital at about 8.00 this morning and it snowed again, quite thickly, for about 40 minutes this morning at about 10.00. The sun came out a bit later and it did get warm enough for most of the trees to lose their icy covering.

Most of the trees in town were clear, but on the approach to the racecourse there were quite a few still quite well-frosted, their numbers increasing the further out of town I went.

The racecouse was white all over at 4.00, except for the huge black covers.

The temperature rise forecast is signifcant for Friday, but still very small tomorrow. I note that the course said on Monday that under the covers the ground is raceable and good/good-to-soft. However, we have had a couple of very cold nights (-12) and days since then.

On arriving home, temperature is quite markedly lower than in town, so will be the same at the racecourse (which is white). Ice still on puddles from this morning -despite getting a full day of sun - and ground rock solid, so unless we have significant temperature rises tomorrow, the X-country race might be a goner - although they have covered the takeoff and landing sides.

I would like there to be racing on Friday, but currently have a tiny, niggling doubt.
 
Last edited:
Update from this afternoon's RP:

"We've covered the whole [chase and hurdles] course and the good news is it's perfectly raceable. Jonjo [O'Neill] came here earlier today and he was very happy with it. The cross-country is covered on take-offs and landings but there are still little bits of the course that are still frozen. I remain optimistic that the race will be on with the others. The race is now off at 1.50pm instead of 1.15pm and we might put it back again depending on how we find it on Friday morning."
 
10/1 Cheltenham not to race on Friday and 25/1 not to race on Sunday.I think clerks of the course are notoriously optimistic.
 
Back
Top