About

This site is an archive of datasets that were part of a blog that was active between 2009 and 2010. There weren't many blog posts, and they were mostly about tracking who might join the ranks of "Omnisurface Stars", so only the datasets are here.

American Thoroughbred horse racing used to have three prominent racing surfaces: dirt, synthetic and turf. Over the last decade the industry as unfortunately moved away from synthetic surfaces, and although there are a few synthetic tracks, there no currently no high profile races run on synthetic surfaces in the US.

Fellow collaborator Jessica Chapel has a good compilation of articles on the rise and demise of synthetic racing surfaces in the US at her Pinboard. And Past the Wire has a useful high level overview of the time period.

This brief project was a labor of love for a group of racing enthusiasts. Below is the slightly modified "About" page text from the original site.

Regardless of what you think about the various surfaces, they're (probably) here to stay. This site aims to compile an ongoing list of horses that have won or been in the money on all 3 surfaces. Horse names link to their page on Pedigree Query. This list is by no means complete!

The site grew out of a discussion on Twitter of how many horses have performed well across the surfaces after Einstein's win in the 2008 Clark. The site is maintained by Dana Byerly of Green but Game & Hello Race Fans, Jessica Chapel of Raceday360 & Railbird and Kevin Martin of Colin's Ghost. Special thanks go to Valerie Grash of Foolish Pleasure & Fillies First and o_crunk for frequent contributions and to Ernie Munick for coining the phrase "Omnisurface Stars".