May I ask Craig and LouisG a question?
I was lucky enough to visit Lingfield while I was in the UK recently and they are pulling up their 'old' Martin Collins polytrack surface which has served them well for 11 years now and replacing it with a new (also Martin Collins) surface (reason being that the fibres have aged and dried out a bit due to weather exposure and they want to refresh it).
Interestingly, they are selling the 'old' surface and when I asked where it was going and who was buying it, it turned out that most of the stuff was going to training yards (a lot of UK trainers have their own, private facilities, including their own tracks and a lot of them have their own polytrack surfaces to train on). In fact, the majority of the surface had already been sold and while we were there a young lad (presumably from a nearby training facility) also came round to enquire about buying some.
Anyway, my question is this - my equine therapy training led me to believe that one obviously trains across various surfaces, but that you primarily train for the surface you will end up competing on. In the UK, this obviously works well. A lot of guys have a choice of surfaces to train on at home and therefore their horses can be conditioned to a number of different surfaces.
I stand under correction, but my understanding is that poly is relatively close to a track surface (well, as a gross generalisation about half way between sand and grass). However, one still has to be careful to condition horses to the new surface gradually as the different surfaces offer different resistances, stresses and strains and hence one has to get used to the different ways they stress a body.
In PE, the proposed poly surface will be used as a training and racing surface, and if you want to train on the same surface you race on, that makes sense to me.
However, at Randjies we have a poly training surface and I assume from there the horses either race on the Vaal sand, or any of the grass surfaces available locally / within striking distance. How is that working out?
I assume that like the rest of the country, the majority of KZN horses train on sand, with occasional grass gallops. If a synthetic racing surface is put in at Greyville purely for racing purposes, I guess horses will be given synthetic track gallops the way horses go for grass gallops?
I'm a traditionalist and like grass tracks, but I guess that's mainly because they look pretty. Research certainly seems to suggest that a (properly managed and maintained) synthetic is a relatively safe racing surface.
I was just wondering how people felt and what the anecdotal experience was in terms of injuries with regard to switching racing and training surfaces?
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
Topic Author
