The Role of Synthetic Tracks in the Age of Climate Change

June was the warmest month on record-the twelfth consecutive month of record global temperatures. Climate change is hitting all walks of life. Horse racing, too.

Last year, unusually hot temperatures coupled with unusually little rain fueled huge wildfires in Canada, impacting air quality and causing the cancellation of racing and training in both Canada and New York.

Just last month, New Mexico's Ruidoso Downs narrowly avoided a wildfire that tore through the area. The track hasn't been so lucky in the aftermath, thanks to frequent flash flooding leading to the cancellation of the last few weeks of the current meet. Experts have linked the severity of these events to a warming climate.

Indeed, scientists warn that extreme weather events are likely to become more frequent and more intense. This includes the hurricanes that barrel up the East Coast, and ripped through Puerto Rico's Camarero racetrack just a few years ago. Climate change has also been linked to the shifting behavior of tornadoes in places like Oklahoma, where one such event recently caused “significant damage” to Will Rogers Downs.

“We are being told by climate scientists that we're seeing an increase in these extreme weather events. What you ordinarily thought of as a New Orleans-type tropical storm is now going to be the norm in a lot of other parts of the country,” said Mick Peterson, executive director of the Racing Surfaces Testing Laboratory (RSTL) and professor of Biosystems & Agricultural Engineering at the University of Kentucky. “These are all incredibly difficult [weather patterns] to deal with on a dirt or turf track.”

Synthetic surfaces, however, offer an alternative for track operators who are currently ripping up their seasonal weather rulebooks all the while ripping out their hair. That, and they can provide something of a bulwark against the economic wreckage wrought by a changing climate.

“You need options,” Peterson said, “if you're going to keep racing and keep a racing schedule on track.”

Synthetics in General

Last month at The Jockey Club Welfare and Safety summit, researchers from McKinsey rolled out several statistics related to synthetic surfaces, mainly aligned with their good safety record. All five synthetic surfaces in North America, for example, are among the 15 safest tracks overall.

When it comes to the role of synthetics in a rapidly warming world, however, it's perhaps those they issued out about dirt tracks that prove most pertinent.

The safest dirt tracks, they said, are in hot, dry climates (with a 1.31 fatality rate per 1,000 starts). Dirt surfaces with the highest equine fatality rates, however, are in climates with wet and cold, freezing winters (1.53 fatalities per 1,000 starts).

“Synthetic tracks really shine in some of those conditions where it is most difficult to maintain a dirt track,” said Peterson.

In short, what synthetic surfaces do in these circumstances is remove a lot of the uncertainty, along with much of the time-consuming maintenance work to protect dirt from inclement weather, he said.

“Last night here at Saratoga, we had a huge amount of rain. Trees down,” said Peterson, who spoke before the start of the Saratoga summer meet. “We're fine. They can handle it. But if they hadn't had the track sealed and properly prepared for it, it would have been an incredibly difficult day to have racing.”

Woodbine made the switch from its old Polytrack to its current Tapeta surface in 2016. According to Ryan Stafford, the track's director of racing surfaces, what the synthetic surface offers is greater consistency in the face of “all-over-the-place” weather patterns.

“This year and last year, we experienced a higher frequency of rain in the summer months, whereas go back a few years, you'd tend to have more drought conditions,” said Stafford.

While the Tapeta “works well” in milder temperatures, “it really shines when we have rain,” said Stafford. He added how “maintenance wise,” heavy rainfall doesn't require the sort of shift in approach that a dirt surface might.

“We tend to go out after every two races with the gallop master [a harrow] to go over the track. We don't really have to switch anything up,” he said. “Maybe I'll put the teeth down another quarter-inch, just to loosen things up a little bit. But it's not like we have to go from the gallop master to the power harrow.”

The same principle applies when temperatures plummet. “In the freezing rain or any adverse weather in the springtime, the synthetic provides a consistent surface for the horses to train on,” said Stafford. “If you have consistently frozen temperatures, it's a lot easier to manage than dirt, which can be different every day.”

The trick, he added, is to routinely restock the materials and the polymer coating.

“Twice a year we'll put fibers on. That helps to replenish the fibers that have broken down. Helps keep everything together,” said Stafford. “And then the Tapeta team will come up and help us put polymers on the track to rejuvenate the wax. The wax that is on there has quite a broad temperature range.”

The Turf Component

Dirt tracks aren't the only ones in the crosshairs of a changing climate.

“Mother Nature always seems to throw things at us that are new and different,” said Gregg Munshaw, director of agronomy at the Pinnacle Ag Research Center.

“We don't know what this global warming means to us. How hot are we going to get? How many more crazy rain events are we going to get a year?” Munshaw added. “But we can solve today's problems and try to guess at what's to come in the future.”

In Munshaw's telling, the science around a good turf course is a complex beast. There are warm-season grasses and cool-season grasses. Soil type is key to water use. Pesticides play a vital part of the equation. Species selection is equally important. Some grasses are better at conducting photosynthesis, and handling heat and drought, than others, for example.

“How the grass grows is fascinating,” said Munshaw. “The warm-season grasses are called C4 grasses. They're more effective at conducting photosynthesis than C3 grasses, which are cool-season grasses like Kentucky bluegrass. They conserve water in the process-they're not just spewing out water through the leaves. They're holding onto the water.”

Is climate change making it harder to maintain a turf course? “Yes and no,” said Munshaw.

Evolving weather patterns are forcing some tracks in the Midwest to change the types of grass they seed their tracks with. It's altering growing seasons. It's even causing a shift in the sorts of diseases that can kill off the turf itself.

“I'd love to go into some of the racing offices and say, 'hey, change your racing to these different times of the year,'” said Munshaw. “But obviously that's not going to happen. They're not going to change-or cannot.”

In the face of heavier seasonal rainfall, one option that track operators have is to widen turf courses to maneuver the running rail. “That would be the ultimate goal, having a wide-enough turf track so you can move racing lanes around,” Munshaw said, pointing favorably to Colonial Downs.

Another option, of course, is to switch the racing onto a synthetic track-if that option is available. “The grass can take a lot, but it has to have a break if you want to keep running on it. You've got to give it time to recover or else it will rip apart,” Munshaw said.

“What NYRA's doing is fantastic,” he added, of the New York Racing Association's plans to use a new mile-round Tapeta surface for a three-month period every winter when Belmont Park reopens in 2026.

“These challenges that we're facing with the changing climate are being met head on by the end users and the [grass] breeders,” he added. “They're coming up with more options to keep these surfaces running at their best.”

The Hotter Climates

The hotter it gets in the West, the greater the premium that will be placed on water. Which begs the question: Which surface uses less water: dirt or synthetic? The answer appears regional.

According to Stafford, he doesn't use nearly as much water on the Tapeta surface during the hot summer months than when it was first installed, and less than what a dirt surface would require.

“At one point in time, we used to put a lot of water on the surface to cool it. But as we've adjusted things over time, we don't have to use nearly so much,” he said.

“It's been holding up well in the heat,” he added. “The biggest factor is the sunshine. If you've got clear skies and the sun beating down on it, it can loosen off the top of the Tapeta. The times are a little bit slower if it's sunny, and a little more kickback. But we've been managing pretty well with it.”

As long-time track superintendent Dennis Moore points out, however, the humidity of the summer months at Woodbine is different to the dry heat of Southern California.

“I think we used about the same amount of water on the synthetic at Hollywood [Park] as we use on dirt,” said Moore, recalling his experiences during California's ill-fated venture into synthetics some 15 years ago.

“We'd put water on before the races. After every race, we would go and put water on,” said Moore. “We'd do it after the races as well.”

What necessitated such heavy water use on Hollywood Park's Cushion Track, said Moore, was how the integrity of the materials changed above a certain temperature.

“When [the material] gets so hot, which is usually about 160 degrees [Fahrenheit], the material starts changing drastically. It gets heavier,” said Moore, who added that frequent watering kept the track to between 100 and 110 degrees.

This is hardly surprising, said Peterson. “In short, wax gets softer and melts when you heat it up,” he said.

While some synthetic surfaces are more adept at withstanding extreme heat than others, said Peterson, more overall research needs to be conducted into the “temperature sensitivity” of synthetic surfaces, and how that impacts the “biomechanics” of the horses going over it.

“I think the Polytrack that is in Australia and New Zealand is doing a good job. And I would like to see some of these arena manufacturers, see what they can do. A lot of them have developed a lot more sophisticated coatings to withstand heat,” said Peterson.

Heavy Rain

Climate experts predict that while California (and the West in general) will see drought periods that are longer and harsher, they'll likely be punctuated by shorter bursts of much heavier and more intense rainfall.

The California Horse Racing Board (CHRB) has an inclement weather policy that precludes training when the main track has been sealed, along with high-speed works over the track for at least another 24 hours once the track has been opened. This last six-month meet alone saw multiple days of cancelled racing because of rain (though interestingly, the CHRB's weather policy still permits racing on a sealed track).

If such a future is indeed on the cards for California, then a switch from dirt to synthetics would largely remove the risk of losing training and race days during unusually wet winters, said Eoin Harty, California Thoroughbred Trainers president and a vocal proponent of synthetic surfaces. It would also help with the coffers, he said.

“If we're not training and racing, we're not earning money. And if we're not earning money, why are we here?” said Harty.

Del Mar and Santa Anita are now consistently two of the safest tracks in the country. But Harty argues that a slew of safety protocols deployed in California in recent years all played a part in the state's marked progress on equine welfare.

“Yes, the tracks are considerably safer, and I think Dennis Moore is a hell of a track man. But there are a lot of mitigating factors that go into it,” said Harty. “Is it the track or the protocols that the trainers have to go through before working a horse or running a horse that makes the difference?”

At the end of the day, said Harty, synthetic surfaces are statistically kinder on horses, and the reintroduction of a synthetic main track to Santa Anita would lessen the need for such rigorous regulatory intervention. It might also reinvigorate the racing product, he added.

“The number of races is down. The numbers of racing days is down. And the field sizes are considerably smaller,” said Harty. “If Santa Anita was a turf-synthetic track, it could even encourage greater participation from international runners.”

Which leads onto some of the other statistics the McKinsey researchers rolled out last month in an effort to dispel common myths associated with synthetic surfaces.

According to their calculations, the average field sizes on all-weather surfaces differed little to those on dirt, while the average win/place/show handle per-race on all-weather surfaces also matched those on dirt surfaces. What's more, they said the average career length in years among horses who ran more on synthetic was not significantly different to those who ran more on dirt.

Florida is often classed as “ground zero” for climate change, due to the cascading impacts from record-breaking hurricanes, sea level rise and flooding. Florida-based David Fawkes describes Gulfstream Park's Tapeta as having “its up and downs, like all tracks.

“It's great to save races because people don't scratch, unless the horse simply doesn't like it,” said Fawkes. “I've got a few horses that simply don't like the synthetic. But then, I've got some horses that don't like the dirt but like the synthetic.”

One negative, he said, is that during the hotter summer months, the track slows down between morning training and the afternoon races.

“In the morning, you can go out there and breeze, and you might work in :46–don't get too excited. In the afternoon when the sun hits it and loosens it up, it's going to struggle to go in :48,” said Fawkes, describing the track as a “little jarry” in extreme heat.

After rainfall, however, “it's tighter and nicer and easier on the horses,” said Fawkes.

“All in all,” he added, “it's pretty good.”