This article is so cool!  It's about a very smart engineer, named Dr. Mick Peterson, who made a way for horses to race safer.  Dr. Peterson invented a simple solution, putting in a special synthetic surface, consisting of materials like, recycled rubber, sand and fibers.  It is very cool and his idea could make horse racing safer for the horses and the jockeys if people use his idea!  I hope they do!  ~Declan

As posted on FORBES.COM |

 

10/31/2012 @ 6:53AM |

Making Racing Safer For Horses, Starting With The Surface

This Friday and Saturday at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, California, hundreds of horses will take to the track for the Breeders’ Cup.  One hundred and eighty horses have been pre-entered in 15 races, and if Dr. Mick Peterson has anything to say about it, they’ll all come home safely.

Concerns about the safety of Thoroughbred racing have never been higher, and while horses contesting the Breeders’ Cup are among the most accomplished and expensive racehorses in the world, that doesn’t mean that they are immune from injury. In fact, the Breeders’ Cup has unfortunately been the site of more than one high-profile breakdown.

Peterson doesn’t think it has to be that way.

He’s not a vet, and he’s not a trainer. Peterson is an engineer, with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the General Motors Institute and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics.  A professor at the University of Maine at Orono, he works with Drs. Christie Mahaffey and C. Wayne McIlwraith to research the role that track surfaces, particularly dirt and synthetic ones, play in equine injury. Mahaffey earned her Ph.D. in engineering at the University of Maine; McIlwraith holds degrees in veterinary science and joint disease research and is based at Colorado State University’s Orthopaedic Research Center Laboratory.  Both are Peterson’s colleagues in the Racing Surfaces Testing Laboratory.

In 2004, racetracks in North American began to replace dirt tracks with synthetic surfaces, which were reputed to be safer than dirt tracks and require less maintenance; the composition of the synthetic material includes sand, fibers, recycled rubber.

While reviews and results of synthetic surfaces have been mixed, recent data funded by the Jockey Club suggest that they do in fact reduce fatal breakdowns. Based on information provided to the Equine Injury Database, horses suffered fatal breakdowns at a rate of 1.3 per 1,000 on synthetic tracks, 1.6 per 1,000 on grass courses, and more than 2 per 1,000 on dirt.

But synthetic tracks are expensive to maintain, and Peterson doesn’t think that they have to be the answer to reducing catastrophic injuries.

“The best dirt tracks,” he said, “are almost as safe as synthetic surfaces.”

So what constitutes a good dirt track? Elementary, says Peterson: it’s all in the moisture.

“A good dirt track is consistent, and water has a huge effect,” he explained. “All the data suggest that consistency is the key, and that the biggest effect is consistent moisture.”

A significant part of dirt track maintenance is watering the track: before and between races, a water truck is driven around the track, spraying water on the track’s surface.  As Peterson points out, that method makes it difficult to achieve consistency. He also notes that few track supervisors keep detailed records of how they maintain track surfaces. This is where he comes in.

This week before the Breeders’ Cup, Peterson and his assistants will be at Santa Anita, creating what he calls “moisture maps” of the track’s surface, examining the moisture content at 144 points, consulting weather stations and evaporation rates, and using the data to try to keep the one mile of the track’s surface as consistent as possible.

Someday, Peterson foresees, an integrated system will have track water trucks automatically controlled, based on the condition of the track at various points.

And while this week Peterson’s concern is the track at Santa Anita, he also works with track superintendents in Kentucky and New York, towards a system that will be in place not only for big racing days, but daily at tracks across the country. The Equine Injury Database makes available to the public information on equine breakdowns, and Peterson envisions compiling daily reports on track maintenance that is available to track management, horse owners, trainers, jockeys, and the public.

Peterson cautions, though, that track surfaces are not one of the primary causes of equine injury. Perhaps as a result of time at the General Motors Institute, he is wont to sprinkle his explanations with automotive analogies.

“If you’ve got a car with a lot of miles on it,” he said, “and you drive over railroad tracks and your shock absorbers go, it’s not the railroad’s tracks fault.”

Peterson’s recent presentation at the Jockey Club’s Summit on the Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse was more emphatic, stating that, based on data in the Equine Injury Database, “the track surface itself is not a significant risk for catastrophic distal limb fracture,” an observation that would seem to contradict the injury statistics informed by the EID.

Equine injury, Peterson explained, is the result of muscular-skeletal disease; catastrophic injuries are the result of an “overload event.” And while he acknowledges that track surfaces can play a role in developing the smaller injuries, he also said that the injuries are a result of a number of factors.

“The way I describe it to trainers is like this,” he said, in his habitually energetic way “A given track on a given day didn’t break the horse’s leg, but every track the horse has been on, how you train the horse, its conformation, individual pre-disposition, shoeing–they all combine to cause muscular-skeletal disease.”

For a man whose professional life is now spent largely thinking about horse racing, Peterson came to the sport late, going to the track for the first time 14 years ago. That first visit was to Santa Anita, where he’ll be working this weekend.

“I had a meeting there in the morning,” he remembered.  “And I saw the mist rising off the track, and the mountains in the distance…there’s so much appealing about it.”

That appeal sits uneasily next to a number of negative perceptions about the sport, the most pernicious of which is caused by the horrific site of a horse breaking a leg on the racetrack and having to be euthanized. And while that risk will never be wholly eliminated, Peterson does think it can be reduced.

“If we can take control of track surfaces in the next ten years, it could have a significant impact on the safety of the horse,” he said.