Other than trainer Bob Baffert, who won two races on Saturday, American horsemen did not fare particularly well in the first Breeders Cup held on an artificial track. In fact, after the brilliant Curlin struggled home fourth in the $5 million Classic as the 4-to-5 favorite, trainer Steve Asmussen immediately said, “”It was the track. It absolutely was the Pro-Ride surface (that beat him).”

Pro-Ride is the commerical name for the synthetic surface that carpets Santa Anita, the hallowed plant hard by the San Bernardino Mountains where dirt made by God was plenty good enough for champions like Seabiscuit, Citation, and Sunday Silence. But God’s dirt was phased out a couple of years ago, supposedly because Man, in his infinite wisdom, had come up with something safer.

If you check the Past Performances, you’ll find that anytime Man thinks he can improve God’s work, the results aren’t too good – discounting, of course, the marvels of plastic surgery that were on guady display at the Breeders Cup.

Nevertheless, Man’s ego is such that he will keep trying until, oh, all the horse farms in Central Kentucky are paved over with asphalt.

By all accounts, the surface at Santa Anita has a spongy quality, making it more like grass – “turf,” as it’s known in the racing game – than dirt. So, naturally, the Europeans, who don’t do any of their racing on dirt, were overjoyed to see the dirt hauled away and replaced by Pro-Ride. (Well, actually, it was first replaced by another synthetic surface, but that didn’t work out very well and had to be replaced.)

So on Saturday, unless you were smoking grass instead of studying it, you couldn’t have been surprised that horses based in England or France won five of the nine Breeders Cup races, including the stunning victory by Raven’s Pass in the Classic.

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Yet it’s also impossible to say how much Pro-Track played in the Europeans’ success. Of their five victories Saturday, only the Classic and the Marathon (won by Muhannak) came on the artificial curse. The others all were in grass races — Donativum in the Juvenile Turf; Goldikova in the Mile; and Conduit in the Turf. The Europeans always do well in the grass races.

Whether it was the track’s fault or not, Curlin’s demise was another devastating P.R. blow for a sport that badly needs a big-time hero. Leading up to the Classic, the hype over Curlin, the leading money-winner ever, was every bit as pervasive as, oh, the hype over Big Brown heading into last June’s Belmont Stakes.

Both disappointed their backers, not to mention racing historians, but at least jockey Robby Albarado had Curlin fighting all the way to the wire — a sharp contrast to what jockey Kent Desormeaux did aboard Big Brown in the Belmont.

Although the colt wasn’t any distress, Desormeaux stopped riding him at the top of the stretch and let him coast home last. That decision violated the rules of racing and affected millions of betting dollars. And unlike Curlin in the Classic, the Big Brown camp couldn’t even use the track – Belmont Park still believes in dirt – as an excuse.

Nevertheless, after interviewing Desormeaux, the New York stewards decided not to penalize, another miscarriage of justice in a sport that has a long history of burying its head in the sand when it comes to enforcing its own rules.

Racing is hardly the first sport to experiment with artificial surfaces. Professional football, baseball, and basketball all have tried it – and all eventually decided that the stuff made by God was the way to go. Yet horse racing has committed to a, ah, course of action that will be difficult to reverse.

The government agency that regulates racing in California has ordered all the state’s tracks to replace dirt with synthetics. Even Keeneland, that bastion of conservatism and tradition, has replaced dirt with something called Polytrack. Of course, that could be explained by the fact that Keeneland owns a piece of the company that makes Polytrack.

Even at Keeneland, we now know, tradition has a price.

Of course, not every American horsemen will agree with Asmussen’s evaluation of the Santa Anita surface. Baffert, for example, returned to the international spotlight with in the Juvenile (Midshipman) and the Sprint (Midnight Lute). Even so, Midshipman is owned by Sheik Mohammed’s Darley Stud and may prep for next year’s Kentucky Derby in Dubai instead of the U.S.

The sheik was notably absent, maybe because he didn’t want to risk being booed by Californians who are tired of America’s dependence on Middle East oil and the role it has played in the sagging world economy.

“Sheik Mohammed wasn’t able to be here because, obviously, there’s a lot going on in the world right now and he’s doing his best to sort it out,” said John Ferguson, the sheik’s racing and bloodstock manager.

Well, while the Sheik is at it, perhaps he can come up with an explanation for why bettors around the world wagered $155,474,553 on the two-day Breeders Cup program at a time when the global economy is tanking. The grass was phony, but the money was very real, much to the pleasure and relief of the industry.

The proponents of artificial surfaces no doubt will point out that this year’s Breeders Cup program was conducted without a single breakdown. That’s the good news. The bad news – at least for those who hate Pro-Ride – is that next year the Breeders Cup is coming back to Santa Anita, the first time the event will be held at the same site in back-to-back years.

The culprit is Churchill Downs, which had the 2009 Breeders Cup locked up until the geniuses in track management decided to get into a pissing contest with the Breeders Cup over how the revenue should be cut up. Rather than give in or compromise, Churchill left the Breeders Cup folks in a mess that Santa Anita was only too happy to clean up. So now it will be 2010 before the Breeders Cup returns to Churchill and dirt made by God.

Breeders Cup president Greg Avioli tried to spin the Europeans’ five victories into a challenge for American horsemen. Perhaps thinking about the recent U.S. victory over Europe in the Ryder Cup at Valhalla, Avioli said, “The Europeans cast down the gauntlet today…and our industry is going to have to come back next year with a lot of good horses if we’re going to take back the Breeders Cup.”

What a bunch of baloney. Let’s borrow a page from Howard Cosell and tell it like it is: The Americans surrendered their biggest advantage when the dirt at Santa Anita was replaced with the phony stuff. So we’ll see you next year – same place, same time – for more of the same results.