Horse Racing

Churchill/Ellis Q&A with Surface Expert Mick Peterson


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Dr. Michael “Mick” Peterson, Jr. is the executive director of the independent Track Surface Testing Laboratory. He is a mechanical engineer who is considered the preeminent racing surface specialist in North America.

His team has conducted an ongoing test at Churchill Downs and will this week be tasked with ensuring that Ellis Park is ready to handle a meet-up race quickly while also helping with surface analysis. continuously at Churchill.

TDN spoke to Peterson early Friday evening after the deaths of 12 horses at Churchill made the company ownership of that track to move part of its remaining spring meeting to Ellis, has not held a race since last summer. The following is an edited version of that conversation.

TDN: Please describe your team’s role, what has been done at Churchill so far and what are the next steps at both Churchill and Ellis.

MP: I’m a professor at the University of Kentucky and the university has established a relationship with the racing industry that allows me to spend half of my time running the non-profit Track Surface Test Lab profits in Lexington. We now have six full-time employees and we work for the Horse Racing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA). We also work for racetracks for testing and we test materials. Our standards, many of them, have been adopted as international standards. Others we are working to get them accepted as international standards.

Our next priority is to do whatever we can to help Churchill and Ellis’ surface assessment for HISA, because we’re moving there and we need to make sure, to the extent possible, that [Ellis is ready and safe to race].

We have a really systematic “pre-flight” process that we go through before every race meets. We tested 2 and a half months ago to get ready for the Churchill race, and then we repeated it later [GI Kentucky] Derby Week. It involves ground-penetrating radar, biomechanical surface testing, and we measure the spot.

At the start of the race, everything was fine. It also looks good after the Derby. We just didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

I won’t pretend that we know everything. That’s not part of what we’re doing. We can work on consistency. But we still have a lot to learn about safety. And that’s really the great thing about HISA. We will do this now at a [nationwide] scale, and it won’t depend on who the CEO is [at any given track] To be. it will be every [track] just do the same thing.

So I thought we were on the cusp of something good. And after that [12 fatalities at Churchill] happens, and it just makes you think, “What don’t we know? What are we missing?”

TDN: What’s next?

MP: At Churchill we’ll be back and I doubt we’ll do some more testing. [West Coast track surfaces consultant] Dennis Moore finished [a round of testing this week], and I just talked to him right before you called, and we just made sure we understood everything we were looking at. He did not find anything of any note there. But we will keep looking.

What we are planning now [at Churchill] is the same test we do for every other track. We will be doing 72 songs this year as scheduled. And we will do the same in Ellis. Anyway, Ellis had a schedule for next week. We just go to [expedite] it, and if we find anything, we’ll fix it. It’s a seasonal track, so it has its own set of challenges. To the best of my knowledge, prior to the announcement, [Churchill representatives] were there [to try to figure out if Ellis] ready.

I think [moving the meet to Ellis] That’s good. We have to find out what’s going on [at Churchill] and look at everything. And I don’t just mean the race track: Horse population, horse history, etc.

TDN: Ellis hasn’t held a race since last summer. Most inactive dirt roads will be rolled and compacted when not in use, then gradually opened up with a harrow before the meeting begins. Where are they in the process?

MP: I do not know. We need to follow up. We have just received a notification [Friday]. But keep in mind that Del Mar is, incidentally, a dirt track that has been the safest major track in North America for the past few years, they’ve had [San Diego County Fair] in this matter [compacted] surface until about a week and a half ago [racing begins].

What we usually say is the trick is to do three days of simulation racing, [which can be condensed into] a 24-hour period. We are talking watering, indiscriminate [and that repeated cycle]. That’s how we make sure the route is fully established. Dennis Moore is probably the one who perfected that.

TDN: Back in 2014-15, when Aqueduct had a series of 12 catastrophic deaths, TDN interview some veterinarians who suggested that in the absence of any identifiable problems, deaths could be statistically explained as a “bad sequence of numbers”. That might make sense mathematically, but theory tends to fail when people are asking for quick answers and causes. Could that be the case at Churchill?

MP: Remember, I’m not a veterinarian. I’m not even close. I am a PhD engineer. But I’m pretty good with numbers. [And] if you look at this, this is absolutely [could be what the New York vets] We are talking about.

TDN: You’ve been working on track safety for over three decades. With a greater focus on horse mortality, do you see an increased pressure to provide “magic bullet” types of answers to complex, multifactorial problems?

MP: The comparison I want to make is what I do like the National Transportation Safety Board when they have a train derailment. I am one of the pieces in the puzzle so they understand it so they can answer and analyze. But it won’t be just one piece. It will be [involve] autopsy results. Drug testing. Past performances of the horses. Training history. All those pieces fit together, and that’s the result of a good autopsy.

It doesn’t happen quickly, and can be much slower than usual [be], which is what I think HISA must focus its efforts on. But my role is to give them the track part of it. I think we got to the point where we did a better job at that than we did. I am not 100% satisfied. But we are working on it.

TDN: Specifically, what are you doing to change the game in the future?

MP: We have a sensor prototype that works on a harrow and it will give us humidity and buffer depth in real time between each race. That would really be a “black box” that goes along with the whole process. [Think of] check out our pre-meeting as a pre-flight checklist. As we move forward, our goal is to make [the sensor] black box [like the one that records in-flight data]. That’s where we’re headed. For better or worse, these are the kinds of events that [spur] evolution.

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