Page 20 - The Game August 2006

20 The Game, August 2006 Your Thoroughbred Racing Community Newspaper
Woodbine’s Bold Move:
Racing Continues as the Polytrack is Installed
By Peter Gross
Fans of contemporary pop journalism will appreciate this: Starting this month, The Game will be dishing out the dirt more than ever. Actually, no single entity in horse racing was slinging dirt around more than Woodbine in July. Starting on Tuesday July 4, crews began the awesome task of removing all the footing from the main track and dumping it on the inner harness track to create a temporary seven-furlong thoroughbred track.
Woodbine is not the first racing organization to embrace Polytrack, but it is the first to build a new surface while still conducting meaningful races. The initial step involved making the harness track viable for the runners and with the help of dozens of trucks and an army of willing hands, the transition took place with surprising
efficiency.
“We did it in a matter of a couple of days,” says
Irwin Driedger, Manager of Racing Surfaces, “It still needs a little fine turning but I spoke with a couple of riders this morning and they felt the horses were going over it very nicely.”
Project co-ordinator Gary Kretschmer was impressed with how smoothly and efficiently a harness track was turned into a runners’ track.
“We moved some 8000 tons of material in about 14 hours,” says Kretschmer, “I’m estimating about 800 men and women hours. We had about 65-70 people moving that track.”
Woodbine President and CEO David Willmot is the driving force behind the installation of Polytrack.
“The more that we researched it, the clearer it became that it is a dramatic increase in the safety factor for the horse and therefore for the jockeys as well,” says Willmot,
“It’s a much more consistent surface. You eliminate sloppy tracks and muddy tracks, it’s less expensive to maintain, and it results in bigger fields which creates greater wagering.”
Willmot was particularly aware of the statistic from Turfway Park, which indicated a 90% reduction in the number of catastrophic injuries to horses during the period after Polytrack had been laid down at that facility.
Last year, Willmot and Kreschmer visited Lingfield Park in England. Polytrack was installed there in 2000 and the feedback those two men received led contributed directly to this summer’s makeover.
“From David’s perspective, he realized that this would revolutionize horse racing,” said Kretschmer.
Polytrack is a product that has evolved over more than two decades. Its inventor, Martin Collins used to train show jumpers and was not satisfied with the sand surfaces the horses had to perform on.
“I wanted something better,” he says on his cell phone from England, “I came up with waste plastic chips from recycled telephone wires chopped up into granule form. We added it to our sand and what it did was prevent the sand from freezing in the winter and it also helped the drainage.”
Realizing he was onto a good thing, Collins continued to experiment. He coated his material with an emulsion or waxy substance that held everything together and also repelled water.
“We started putting fibres in the sand,” says Collins, “We added rubber and elasticated fibres similar to carpet fibres.”
The reason for this was to create something very similar to turf, Collins wanted a synthetic substance that resembled the root structure one would see if you pulled a chunk of sod apart.
Six years ago, Lingfield became the first track to install Collins’ Polytrack and it has been quite cost effective.
“In the whole six years they never spent a penny on it,” says Collins proudly, “As well, your injury factor comes down by 85%.”
On Saturday July 8, all of Woodbine’s dirt races were run on the ‘inner’ track and the jockeys pretty well gave the ad hoc surface unanimously strong reviews.
Heavy machinery was used to efficiently remove the dirt surface from the main track to the temporary inner dirt track at Woodbine. Michael Burns Photo - courtesy of WEG

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