I AIN'T GOT NOTHIN' BUT LINGFIELD, EIGHT DAYS A WEEK

The loss of any fixtures scheduled to take place on the sainted sands of Kempton, Lingfield, Southwell or Wolverhampton usually elicits one of two responses from those less kindly disposed towards this particular mode of racing, and each of those responses is about as regrettable as the other.

“It’s supposed to be all-weather racing!  Racing for all weathers! It’s failed!”, goes one. It hasn’t failed, of course: as time has worn on, the realisation that even a carefully tended Polytrack or Fibresand surface cannot successfully resist certain sets of circumstances has led to the monikers “artificial surface racing” and “synthetics racing” rightfully creeping into the lexicon of the broader racing media with just a little more regularity.

Time was that Lingfield didn’t even refer to its fare at this time of year in its publicity material as “all-weather”, but rather as the yet less misleading “Winter Flat”. It may still.

A Southwell course inundated by flood water, as it was back in summer 2007 and is again to the tune of nine inches at the time of writing this, palpably isn’t an “all-weather” track. It’s fatuous of the venue’s detractors to call it such, and then gloat when the Fibresand racing line there inevitably fails to reveal hitherto unrealised King Canute qualities.**

[** A history buff interjects - Southwell did reveal hitherto unrealised King Canute qualities, didn't it, if the King's intention was to prove the limitations of kingship by failing to stave off the incoming tide?  Tut tut...]

“Who cares, it’s a meeting nobody wants and a type of racing nobody wants”, goes the other triumphalist line. That’s an opinion which carries especially little water so soon after two consecutive years in which cold snaps ran amok with turf fixtures for far more than the odd occasional day, and in which the synthetics fixture programme did virtually survive intact to ensure the racing show stayed on the road in some capacity during the worst wintery excesses of both of those years.

More recently still, artificial surface racing has demonstrably been what appreciable numbers of Flat connections have wanted, despite the core period of the National Hunt equivalent being in full cry simultaneously. Only last Wednesday (November 28th), all three Polytrack venues were able to host eight-race cards on the same day, amassing 239 runners between them at an average of a microdot less than 10 per race.

Those returns hardly suggest a mode of racing heading towards a major winter decline participation-wise. Indeed, one has to go back as far as Wolverhampton on Tuesday, October 9th for the last meeting on Polytrack or Fibresand which wasn’t extended, through divisions at the 48-hour stage, to a maximum of eight races.

Winter Flat horses there are still many of, then, but the events of the past fortnight or so have contrived to halve the number of courses at which they can ply their trade.

Southwell's location on a flood plain of the River Trent proved its downfall for the second time in five and a half calendar years when receiving a drenching over the weekend of November 24th-25th, and the projected date for the resumption of action there has already inched into February. If horses can seethe, then La Estrella, setter of a new British record for the longest unbeaten run at any one track when obliging for the thirteenth time at the Nottinghamshire venue barely three weeks earlier, is almost certainly seething right now.

At least the clamours of 2007 to use the flood damage as reason enough to jettison Fibresand and convert Southwell to yet another Polytrack venue don't seem to be quite as prevalent this time round.  For many reasons, from betting angles for ardent Southwell form students to upholding the variety of British Horse Racing the product, good thing too.

Southwell couldn’t do much about the floods, and contrary to belief, Wolverhampton probably didn't have as much scope to address its own current problem as might be imagined. The low temperature-induced balling of the Polytrack at Dunstall Park, which by turns was accumulating around horses' hooves in a dangerous manner and also giving rise to some truly diabolical kickback during Friday evening's (eventually completed) fixture, was all the more evident on the following night, to the extent that neither man nor beast could stand it any longer and an abandonment was effected three races in.

The projected resumption of racing at Wolverhampton is December 14th. That's 13 days on from the abandonment, of which at least seven will have been required to apply the binder coating to the Polytrack which will weatherproof it adequately, and several more to relay the course as necessary. That's time which Britain's busiest racecourse doesn't ordinarily have at this time of year - its sole gaps in the entire 2012 calendar of 13 days or more ran from May 21st to June 7th, and from July 16th to 30th.  Needless to say, any effect of cold weather on the surface was hardly likely to come to the fore around those times of year.

Arena’s options for reallocating those lost fixtures won't have been particularly plentiful, assuming offering them for sale to Jockey Club Racecourses and Kempton Park was never under consideration. Transferal to a turf Flat venue is of course a non-starter at this time of year, and conversion of the given fixtures to National Hunt a denial of opportunities to the still-sizeable pool of winter Flat horses currently in active service. Besides which, Arena would surely recognise the mixed signals (verging on bitter irony) of converting a Flat fixture to jumps and then awarding it to Folkestone as an extra fixture mere weeks before calling time on the Kent venue, i.e. is this a course they would like to keep on, or not?

Reactivating Great Leighs was another suggested solution which has gained traction in some areas of cyberspace, and the fondness in those and other quarters for this long-mothballed track is not to be scoffed at out of hand. Always the fairest, least sharp of the five synthetics venues (would one go as far as to suggest galloping in nature? Certainly comparatively so...), the honesty of the Polytrack surface there rarely, if ever, was a matter of any doubt; and the fact it has been used on and off for schooling by Newmarket trainers since losing its racing license suggests that what degradation may have occurred to it in the last four years or thereabouts has not been significant enough to render it even remotely dangerous.

The fixtures and fittings, virtually untouched by paying customer since January 2009 and sure to have deteriorated to some extent (however limited) in the interim, may be a different matter, but a workaround to that would have been to run replacement meetings at Great Leighs without any paying customers - just races put on for the benefit of the horses, their connections, and the off-course punting populace at large.  There's almost an argument to suggest that this is what they already were - it is not as if the fixtures would all have attracted high-thousand attendances in their original incarnation.

That's all as maybe, however. The solution to a tricky and unanticipated problem has been to commit Lingfield to eight consecutive days of Polytrack racing, from today (December 5th) through to the 12th. Unsurprisingly, a run of this many consecutive days’ racing at one British venue is without precedent in any of the 20 years since the advent of Sunday racing has made made such a succession feasible.

That the same racing line will have to be used over and over again during those eight days is nothing that would be countenanced on a turf course out of simple fears over the deterioration over time of the racing surface. Even the nearest natural-surface equivalents to Lingfield’s imminent marathon, the week-long Galway and Listowel Festivals, share the burden between the Flat and jumps courses for their respective durations, and have the scope to move to fresh ground as necessary.

Other than maybe an adjustment of the inside rail, Lingfield’s Polytrack circuit offers no such versatility. In any event, it’s hard to see a reduction of the safety limit per race to, say, 10 runners to facilitate even a temporary or phased cordoning off of the inner line sitting all that well with a trainer populace still eager to find opportunities for its winter Flat charges, or with a bookmaking fraternity keen to see the course’s usual maximum field size of 12 or 14 (depending on the distance) hit as often as possible.

The hope, then, simply has to be that through whatever raking, harrowing or other remedial work takes place in between fixtures, the Polytrack proves durable enough to withstand a sustained onslaught of hooves the likes of which it has never yet experienced.

In Lingfield’s favour at least is that the current surface is anything other than a tired one. Relaid during a two-month period of inactivity, Polytrack racing only resumed at the Surrey venue as recently as Wednesday, October 17th, and in total has taken place there on only 10 occasions between then and the start of this eight-day event.

Simply put, if the surface is ever going to be able to withstand this sort of workload, it is now.