Sport: Track Treatment

Year ago the California Jockey Club, headed by Novelist Peter B. Kyne, baptized the new $500,000 Bay Meadows track, 20 miles out of San Francisco, with high hopes. Promptly these hopes were dashed. Rain always transformed the new track into a morass of mud which always dried out hard as rock, ruined the hoofs of many a horse, the disposition of many a jockey.

One day last spring, the disgruntled directors motored to Pacific Portland Cement Co.’s nearby plant to arrange for reconditioning the track surface with new soil and oystershells. Instead of this stock remedy, the company’s chief agronomist, white-thatched, red-faced James Wilkes Jones, advised treating the soil itself. Upon examination he found that it consisted of nonporous and nonabsorbent substances. To rectify this, to get a soil that was ”friable, moist and mellow,” he had ten tons of secret minerals churned into the soil by a special harrow and hopper-spreader. By September, after two months of semiweekly treatments, Agronomist Jones felt the best possible moisture control had been obtained. The surface, he proudly puffed, was “like an Oriental rug.”

Fortnight ago an obscure 8-year-old named Winslow proved Expert Jones correct. Apparently unaware that a heavy rain had fallen the night before, the aged gelding romped over the rubbery, cushioned surface to set a new track record (2:04 3/5) over the 1¼ mile course. Astonished horsemen believe that this discovery, applied to other courses, may well lop off several seconds from existing records, will at least remove the bane of all racing men, a slow, wet track.