US horse racing in winter

I'm guessing you get a lot of strange results during this time of the year, much as you do on heavy turf tracks in the UK and AUS.

I was watching a couple of hours of Charles Town and Penn National races and saw 3 different incidents where a jockey was thrown off or a horse lost its footing and went down.  

Is this pretty standard for this time of year on dirt tracks?  Are they quite icy as it's hard to tell from just watching footage.

Good question but I really haven't seen a major difference.

In South Florida we get big fields with an influx of shippers during the winter & plenty of younger horses. I would attribute jockey issues more to the inexperienced horses in the gate or bolting once out of the gate.