And if you pop along to a public park this morning you are likely to see some football pitches. They'll have goal posts, corner flags and irate managers shouting unintelligible instructions from whitewashed sidelines.

But would you consider playing next month's cup final on one of them? No. Not even the FAI would think of that.

So why on earth was Monmouth Park chosen to host last week's Breeders Cup meeting and how does a nation that has elevated sports organisation to an art form get things so badly wrong? The heavily marketed 'Super Bowl' of racing turned out to be a visual mess and a killing field for the most charismatic horse of recent years.

The Breeders Cup is one of the few racing events in America that is broadcast on mainstream television but this year left its crossover audience with two painful memories. One will be of mud-splattered horses with unrecognisable jockeys skidding around a waterlogged track. It resembled a race on the beach at Laytown if the tide came in unexpectedly and marooned the whole field. The other will be of George Washington's broken hearted connections, weeping as their hero is taken away by ambulance, his career and life ended on the sloppy dirt of New Jersey.

In fairness to the organisers, when they awarded the meeting to Monmouth they were not to know that the event would be preceded by a two-day deluge that would have had Noah reaching for his hammer and saw.

Yet this possibility is precisely why the NFL almost always holds the real Super Bowl in Florida or California and if they venture north with their showpiece they make sure that the stadium has a roof.

The whole sorry episode has added fuel to an ongoing debate in America regarding the safety of traditional 'dirt' tracks relative to newer, synthetic 'polytrack' surfaces. The argument is sometimes crudely characterised as 'animal lovers versus gamblers' but is much more intricate than that. Supporters of synthetic surfaces are convinced they are safer, while the traditionalists contend that dirt is equally safe and additionally offers more reliability in form interpretation. The 'polytrackers' seem to be winning the fight.

California has recently legislated that all its tracks convert from dirt by the end of the year or lose their licence and Turfway Park, Kentucky, was the first course to go fully synthetic in 2005. In their first season with the new surface they had three horse fatalities. The previous year it had been 24.

One of the safety issues with dirt is that heavy rain is prone to wash away the loose topping which means horses are effectively slamming their feet through the mud and hitting a hard core base. At Monmouth 54 other horses ran on the same dirt track without shattering their legs but George Washington was always having some unique problems with the surface. His jockey, Mick Kinane, reported that "he travelled well for me but the kickback down the back was horrendous. He was climbing into the air trying to avoid it and you couldn't believe how bad it actually was." The chief vet at the track, Dr C Wayne McIlwraith, ventured a reason for his discomfort.

"It is also possible, since he had raced primarily on turf, that he might not have been landing as smoothly as a horse more experienced over the surface." It would be comforting to accept this proposal if it wasn't for the inconvenient truth that George glided across a dry dirt track in the same race last year in Kentucky.

There is, of course, no conclusive evidence that the state of the going was directly responsible for the injury, but it is fairly clear that the horse could go on dirt. It was slop that was the problem. Whatever the cause of his injury, George Washington's memory will never quite escape the forlorn image of him standing ankle deep in what looked like recently poured concrete, a shattered leg desperately combing the air in search of relief. But his legend should outlive his record on the track and the meagre progeny that will succeed him following an unsuccessful adventure at stud last spring. His winning record was less than 50 per cent and he won two less Group One races than the recently-retired Dylan Thomas who only seemed to attract half the attention of his flamboyant stablemate. Think of George Best and Bobby Charlton. It is easy to visualise Dylan, like Bobby, training hard and going straight home to his family afterwards while George, like his namesake, heads off to Monte Carlo for a gallon of champagne and a weekend with the latest Miss World. It was his flair that made him unique.

His trainer, Aidan O'Brien, always differentiated him from his long list of greats. He told RTE earlier this week that "he was an unbelievably talented horse. He had a big attitude and a big ego. He believed he was the best and he knew he was the best. He was just one of those freaks that don't come along very often . . . he was a natural athlete."

In another sad accident of fate, George Washington was born on the same farm in the same year as Barbaro, the easiest Kentucky Derby winner in 60 years who also shattered a leg on the racecourse. The attempts to save Barbaro's life instigated a painful soap opera that reached an inevitable conclusion when the horse was eventually destroyed. When O'Brien saw the damage he knew immediately that tough love was required this time. "It was obviously a straightforward decision. The bone had gone through his skin so there was no chance of surgery. To try to get him back together, he would have suffered a lot more, so it was the right thing to do."

Next year the Breeders Cup meeting reverts to Santa Anita, outside Los Angeles and, hopefully, a safer polytrack surface. The good news is that it never rains in Southern California. Not like Monmouth Park, where last weekend it poured. Man, it poured.