The dirt

[elkurzhal]

Some very slow times yesterday, slowest ever for a couple of the heats. If not for the safety issues being at the forefront, I would surely be expecting a speed up speed favoring track today. Will be watching the first couple dirt races intently, from my daughter volleyball game like a true degenerate.

[ozzy]

Elk, I think there is no question they have set the track up to be deeper and less like the hard tracks we are used to seeing in Cali, especially in the stretch. Fast early and slow, slow late. You better be a fit horse on that dirt course to have any say that’s for sure.

[elkurzhal]

39.67 last 3f Distaff
52.09 last half-mile Classic

Will be interesting to watch for some of those stuck in the kickback to run again.

[1hooper]

DRF.

McGaughey said he thought Santa Anita “did a terrible job” with the track surface.
“They want to make it like a beach. It doesn’t work,” he said. “The best horse won the race. The second horse would have been second. But I had been warning my friends that they’d look at the charts and be amazed at what they’d see, how far horses would be separated. I was hoping the track would tighten down as the week went on. It didn’t.”

[1hooper]

Hersch DRF

The dirt surface Saturday at Santa Anita was slow; Friday it was even slower. Baffert and other local trainers talked about the way fields in dirt races Friday and Saturday wound up spread out all over relatively vast distances. The interpretation was obvious – a large percentage of them were struggling to cope with a deep, difficult surface.
The tiring track enhanced the standard fast-early, slow-late nature of American dirt racing. The last three furlongs in the Breeders’ Cup Distaff, a 1 1/8-mile race, went in 39.57, beyond pedestrian. The final half-mile of the Breeders’ Cup Classic took 52.09 seconds to run, falling into the category of “timed with a sundial.” And that was Saturday! Friday was even slower. Storm the Court went 1 1/16 miles winning the Juvenile in 1:44.93, the slowest 1 1/16-mile Juvenile in the race’s history. The Juvenile came up fast compared to the Juvenile Fillies, where British Idiom required a hard-to-process 1:47.07 to complete her winning 1 1/16-mile journey.
I say this regularly and it applies especially to this Breeders’ Cup: When you contest races over a radical surface you limit the pool of horses capable of producing something close to a baseline performance over it. It’s a tough way to conduct “championship racing” for sure.
As for the grass course, the portable inner rail was taken down before Thursday races exposing a strip of fresh, unused ground that proved to be the best part of the course. Speed could be very effective both Friday and Saturday, a trend related to the ability of front-runners to find the fence and the bouncy part of the course.