Tracked down

Time was when the Pune races would be cancelled for days at a stretch. Rain played spoilsport. To counter this, races which started in th...

Time was when the Pune races would be cancelled for days at a stretch. Rain played spoilsport. To counter this, races which started in the first week of August, were preponed to the last week of July and then to the second week of July as the number of races and horses increased.

Big names in the racing circuit 8212; Dr C S Poonawalla, Z S Poonawalla, D H Dhunjeebhoy, and N K Pudumjee felt the need for a monsoon track to tide over the crisis. The clerk of the Hyderabad Race Course, V N Reddy, was called to Pune and the track was laid here in April 1991. The old tar track was converted into the monsoon track. It took a year for the track to settle and mature. Racing started on this track from in 1992.

The monsoon track is used only when it rains heavily or the old track takes a beating. However, problems arose when the tracks were used for the morning workouts. During a heavy downpour, it became an impossible to work the horses. The sand track did not help one bit.

Then the vision and knowledge of Zavaray Poonawalla gave birth to the laying of an all-weather track in Mumbai and Pune. He contacted the Track Master International in the United States. Steve Wood, the consultant, arrived in Pune with his son and his assistant John, who maintains the track in California.

Work on the new track continued for a month. The old sand track with 10 inches of sand was made the base. It was scraped, rolled, watered and cambered cambering is the slant given to a road on both sides. The RWITC is the only club which boasts of the all-weather track in India today. Horses work out better as the grip and the cushioning effect are perfect. In Mumbai, this has helped to reduce labour as it does not require manual raking, dribbling, watering, levelling. What the all-weather track needs though is careful monitoring.

The weather has to be assessed to take the right decision and in Pune that can be an extremely difficult job. Some of the top trainers have endorsed to the excellence of the all-weather track. Narendra Lagad says it is a beautifully maintained track and is satisfied with the horses workout.Being financially viable with negligible damage problems, this has indeed been a life-saver.