When Last We Left UB

When last we left UB (which seems a very long time ago!) he had just finished 3rd in his first start for trainer Jerry Wylie. If you’ll remember, just making it into and then out of the starting gate with all four feet on the ground was a tremendous amount of progress. Finishing “in the money” was icing on the cake.

UB’s third at Turfway was racing on a synthetic surface, which had quickly become all the rage in the racing world. At this point in time, fraught with bad press raining down due to tragedies like the breakdowns suffered by Barbaro and Eight Belles, Thoroughbred racing was seeking to improve its image. And fast.

As is so common in our industry, the sport was all about the quick fix. Many tracks jumped on the bandwagon, trading in their old dirt racing surfaces for the “poly,” touted by it’s creators to greatly increase safety and vastly reduce catastrophic breakdowns.

Turfway was the first Kentucky track to switch to this surface, produced under such names as Polytrack and Tapeta. This type of racing surface was composed of ground up rubber and carpet fibers and was supposed to allow moisture to drain right through, so that horses would no longer ever race on a “sloppy” track.

The California racing commission even went so far as to mandate all of their tracks to switch to synthetic surfaces—a move that forced the closure of tracks that could not afford to do so.

But what happened, as racing commenced on the “Poly-crap,” as many horsemen began to refer to it, is that a different kind of injury became common. Soft tissue injuries like bowed tendons and blown suspensories were seen more and more. Horses hacked and coughed and snorted and blew as they cooled out after races and sometimes for days after due to the airborne carpet fibers they sucked into their lungs as they raced.

And horsemen were told that if they had “grass” horses that preferred running on turf instead of dirt the Poly was the kind of track for them. Well, not exactly, as it seems that the Poly was an entirely new experience—a third entity—and yet another surface that a horse might possibly love or possibly hate.

UB was lukewarm about it, but as we were about to find out, when it came to racing it was always UB’s way or the highway.

DAILY NOTES: I got used to waking in the morning with a WWF-like announcer’s voice in my head screaming “In this corner, we have the darkest force walking the Earth…the Prince of Darkness…aka Satan. In that corner, appearing shaky and scared and trying not to embarrass Christ by calling herself a Christian and then doing something un-Christian-like…Shon Wylie! LET’S GET READY TO RUMBLE!!!

Some days the best I could to as far as prayer went was to beg “Please, God, just don’t leave me.” I would also pray for my temper not to get the best of me, which happens a lot. But as I began to read 21 Reasons Bad Things Happen to Good People, I realized that I might finally be able to point my friend toward an answer to her question. And draw the strength I needed to get through each day.

Dave Earley’s book begins:

Why do bad things happen to good people? It’s a question we all ask. Every day in the newspaper we read the tragic tales of suffering, pain, and evils on planet Earth. Horribly bad things happen to very good people. Men with large families and women who are single moms lose their jobs. People get cancer. There are devastating floods and fires, hurricanes and tornadoes. Babies die or are born with crippling diseases. People are robbed, mugged, raped, abused and murdered. In some parts of the world, Christians are tortured for their faith.

Seeing it all laid out like that in print made me see just how preposterous it must seem to some that a loving, all-powerful God exists.