Santa Anita Cushion track claims it's first victim

[NoChanceToDance]

Originally Posted by Cardus

While England on average recieves about 22" of rain each year, Los Angeles receives about 15". While that is a sizable difference, consider how the precipitation is distributed: the rainy season is much shorter in SoCal than the nearly 12-month cycle in which rain falls in your country. Have you ever seen a Southern California mudslide, the result of a few inches of rain in a very short (a few hours, one day) period? And this rain occurs during the Santa Anita winter-spring meet for the most part. When it rains in October-January, how much flat racing is conducted in England?

It's not simply a matter of how much rain, but how much rain falls within specified time periods.

Well put it this way..... this year we have suffered up to 3 inches of rain within a few hours in our "summer", all around the country, and apart from Southwell (which was washed away) all of the other tracks with artificial surfaces were fine (the drainage just needed a little helping hand, that's all).

As far as i'm aware the rain suffered at SA was not a 'flash flood' or anything like that.

As sumitas said, these tracks are designed to take as much rain as they possibly can. They have been tested when the surface was being developed. The drainage of poly is usually excellent. I don't know what differences there are with cushion track, but i can't image them to be too different.

edit: and to answer your final question, the all weather racing is throughout the year. So i have only seen 2 or 3 all weather cards abandoned because of the surface and that was because of heavy snowfall. The other all weather meetings abandaned in the winter have been because of fog.