Transitions - tips for training on synthetic and racing on dirt
/
“He not busy being born is busy dying,” to borrow from a Bob Dylan song. It has application to Thoroughbred horse racing.
Oh, there’s been dying—Arlington Park, Calder, Hialeah, Hollywood Park, Suffolk Downs and Golden Gate Fields to name but a few major tracks that have passed since the turn of the century.
But there’s rebirth, too. (The lyric above is from a song ironically entitled, “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).”
The “bleeding” in racing, if not minimized, is way less than in the past. In its relative infancy HISA, the self-regulatory agency, has significantly impacted the use of illegal medication; racetrack fatalities are at a record low thanks to better track maintenance (along with med regulation); and still to be rebirthed in 2026 is a new Belmont Park.
For traditionalists, that pesky synthetic surface is still around. If there hasn’t been a rebirth with synthetic surfaces, it is at least on its proverbial feet in horse racing despite Del Mar, Keeneland, and Santa Anita laying then lifting it to return to dirt.
Belmont Park will include it with their dirt and turf courses with something vitally important: an infield tunnel enabling horses to reach all three surfaces with no interruption for horses crossing one track to get to another.
Training on synthetic surfaces for dirt racing is standard practice for many trainers and inherently practical. One, it’s all-weather—impervious, precipitation-wise, to everything short of a monsoon. Two, with the exception of freezes, it is now “all-climate.” No longer is it “tight” during morning workouts in colder temperatures and loose and sticky in hot weather.
Three, and maybe most critically, trainers have learned how to train on it for dirt races.
“Horses just skip across it,” said trainer Mark Casse, a proponent of synthetic surfaces. In fact, the ease with which they travel over it requires an adjustment from normal training on dirt. “When you train on dirt, the horses run in it. It's a solid where there is no rebound effect from the dirt. On the synthetic it actually bounces back a little bit.”
Richard Budge, a former racetrack trainer on four continents who is now general manager at Margaux Farm, a training center in Midway Kentucky, elaborated on Casse’s observation. “Without the ‘bounce’ on synthetics a horse on a dirt surface feels impact straight up to their knees and shoulders, which tires them and adds bone stress.”
“You have to train them a little harder, a little quicker, more often, in my opinion,” he added.
Casse expressed it thusly: “When things take less effort, then you have to do more than get them right, get them fitter.”
Even with a more stringent training regimen on synthetics as opposed to dirt, there are benefits beyond fitness. Trainer Eoin Harty, a self-described fan of synthetic surfaces, points out the obvious: “If your horse is sounder longer, it runs more often, it has a lengthier career.
“I think in general, dirt tracks certainly seem to have gotten better over the last four or five years, but in general, they take a toll on them.”
The bottom line is the synthetic surfaces of ten years ago are not what horses are training and running on now. Specifically, manufacturers of synthetic surfaces tweaked the composition of elements, reducing the slide that occurs when front hooves strike the racetrack surface.
The reduction is much less than in the past and much less than what happens on a dirt track. This is why a term often heard is horses run “over it.” Front hooves essentially don’t penetrate deeply into a synthetic surface like they would on dirt.
Also the surface needs minimal maintenance, far less than the frequent and necessary harrowing of dirt. It’s a flat base that doesn’t wash down toward the rail. There’s also minimal kickback so that track basically stays in place as opposed to dirt literally dug up and thrown back during races, producing a surface that is “cuppy” with divots.
The benefits with maintenance are immense and economical for trainers. “[On dirt] there's a break at six-thirty. There's a break at seven forty-five. And there's another break at eight-thirty,” said Harty. That’s an hour and a half of your daily training schedule that's lost.
“You're forced to hire more help just in order to get your horses out. It makes things more expensive, whereas, if you're at Turfway Park and you've got thirty horses, you can pretty much get them out to exercise in two hours with two exercise riders.”
Mark Casse, who is Florida-based, offers a more extreme example of low maintenance required with synthetics. “In one day, with two year old sales--working at seven o'clock in the morning and breezing two-hundred horses into the middle of the afternoon--you won't see a whole lot of track change.
“That would never be the case in Florida on dirt. You'd have to be putting so much water on it, we'd be having breaks every forty-five minutes. “
Perhaps not surprisingly, most horses like synthetic surfaces, according to Mark Casse. It would stand to reason both for the feel of it as they run and also familiarity. They all grew up running on grass, Casse said. Synthetic surfaces are the closest approximation to it.
“I would say that probably seventy-five or eighty percent of horses will move well over turf. You hardly find a horse that doesn't move better over the turf. I would say about the same number on synthetic, maybe eighty or ninety percent of horses will run on and like synthetics.” He estimated that probably only thirty to thirty-five percent of horses actually like running on dirt.
Richard Budge said the preference with most horses is immediately evident watching a horse travel over synthetic and how it differs from dirt. “You can tell the way that they move over the surface. Horses really spring over it.”
Budge, Casse, and Harty would tell you that while there are expectations in training, they should be confined to horse health. A horse race is still a horse race where anything can happen. The one hedge or angle that might possibly be a first timer to a dirt race who has trained on synthetics or better, raced over it before running on dirt.
“On the synthetic side, there's not a whole lot of kickback. There's a little bit, but it seems to settle right back where it came from. On a dirt track, of course, you’re going over it at thirty-five or forty miles an hour. When a horse puts his hooves down and pushes off, there’s a clod of dirt that was under his hoof that is now twenty feet behind them,” said Harty.
“With all that sand kicked in their face it's overwhelming for a lot of horses, and they just don't like it,” he added. “With synthetic, any kick back kind of bounces off and it’s not really much of a bother. Horses can sit mid-pack or at the back before making a stretch run.
“Look at the spread from first to last in a synthetic race compared to a dirt race. In dirt racing it can be up to thirty lengths, but with a synthetic they're more bunched.” Harty believes the difference in kickback between dirt and synthetic is the reason also for how horses finish.
Rarely will you see horses running five wide down the stretch like you will in races over a synthetic surface. The reason? They haven’t been deterred by heavy kickback.
One practice to familiarize a horse with kick back on dirt is to run them behind one or even two horses to feel and get cast-off to kickback.
The synthetic surface at the new Belmont should garner a lot of attention for its novelty as well as its effect on racing as a whole. “You'll see a big influx of Canadian horses going there for the winter to run,” Casse believes.
He envisions a circuit of Belmont, Woodbine, and Turfway. So, too, does Richard Budge foresee it with something added: a synthetic Triple Crown.
Recently he looked at a Saturday card at Turfway and noticed nearly every race had overfilled. That is a handicapper’s delight.
With the current Triple Crown, trainers like Casse and Harty aren’t shy about training at Turfway (a mere 94 miles away from Churchill Downs) on that track’s Tapeta surface. Rich Strike, the Kentucky Derby winner in 2022 trained at Turfway. Currently Eoin Harty has a Triple Crown series contender, Poster, training there.
It seems as if the bias against synthetics has weakened considerably over the last decade. One piece of evidence comes from Mark Casse.
“About twenty years ago NYRA had a special committee to look into synthetics. I think at the time, they probably would have done it, but they couldn't afford it.”
Casse remembered a trainer telling him, “‘We can’t do it. We have to worry about tradition.” He responded, “You’re not going to have to worry about tradition because you’re going to be history.
“I want to say about two years ago he called me and said, ‘You were right.’” Tradition hasn’t blocked the synthetic surface going in at Belmont.
“If you stand still, you get run over,” said Casse.
Horses will keep running no matter if there are fewer racetracks or fewer races. And they’ll do so on the best surfaces in the history of the sport—synthetic or dirt.
“He not busy being born is busy dying.”
