This is New Zealand's opportunity

[Berri 2,131]

From the Racing Post

For a country that enjoys nothing more than a bout of Pommie baiting, Australia has taken the annual British invasion on the Melbourne Cup with good grace. Perhaps that’s because British-trained horses do not have a great record in the country's most prestigious race.

There have been several near-misses but Cross Counter’s triumph last year was the first by a British trainer. Since Dermot Weld spirited the prize away from Australasia with Vintage Crop in 1993 there have been three wins for Ireland, two for France and one each for Japan and Germany.

At this stage it looks as though the most potent overseas challenge this year will come from Japan, which struck an early blow in the preamble when Mer De Glace landed the Caulfield Cup four days ago.

Another Japanese-trained runner Lys Gracieux is favourite for Saturday’s Cox Plate, which is Australia’s premier weight-for-age race. Both horses are owned by the U Carrot Racing syndicate, an offshoot of Northern Farm, which is an even more dominant breeding enterprise in Japan than Coolmore in Europe.

For horses trained outside Australia, the Caulfield Cup represents the starting gun in a frantic scramble for starting berths in the Melbourne Cup itself. There are numerous other springboards but it seems likely the Australian stayer, long since an endangered species, is about to plumb new depths.

A nadir was reached last year, when just three horses in the 22-strong field were bred in Australia. Of the top 20 horses in ante-post lists for this year’s race, all but three started their racing lives outside Australia – and of those three, two were bred in New Zealand.

This would have been unthinkable 50 years ago, when staying horses were still highly prized in Australia. And it would have been just as unthinkable 50 years ago to envisage an Australian horse winning a Group 1 sprint at Royal Ascot. But those axioms have been turned on their heads. Australia’s stayers are a pale shadow of their European counterparts, while Australian sprinters have no peer on turf anywhere in the world.

 

Ten Sovereigns; the July Cup winner proved no match for Australian sprinters in the Everest

Edward Whitaker (racingpost.com/photos)

 

We saw as much on Saturday, when Ballydoyle’s Ten Sovereigns finished stone cold last in the 12-runner The Everest, a Group 1 sprint over six furlongs. The colt who made most of the running to win the July Cup over the same distance was simply no match for Australia’s speed merchants, who are trained to sprint in a far more professional way than their European brethren.

Granted, Ten Sovereigns was racing around a bend for the first time, but Ascot’s stiff six furlongs down the straight track makes unusual demands of Australia’s sprinters and that does not stop them winning.

Ironically, this professional approach to training sprinters in Australia is in large part responsible for the dearth of stayers. Two-year-olds are prepped to hit the gates running, whatever their bloodlines. They cannot otherwise be competitive. An acute shortage of races for 'distance' horses is another contributing factor, and the collective sum of these parts is that breeding horses for long-distance races in Australia has become a futile pursuit.

Even so, imagine how it would feel if a 22-runner King George at Ascot featured ten runners who were trained on different continents – and of the remaining 12, seven or eight had started their careers outside Britain and had only recently been imported?

Actually, you don’t have to leave it to your imagination. Simply tune in to Saturday’s Vertem Futurity, for which 11 of the 12 entries are trained by Aidan O’Brien.

But that’s the reality of this year’s Melbourne Cup. Prominent among the home-trained contingent are Constantinople, Finche, Mirage Dancer and Mustajeer. They are all middle-distance/staying horses who featured prominently in Europe of late.

It’s not just the Futurity that has collapsed under O’Brien’s weight of numbers. The trainer’s fingerprints are all over the Melbourne Cup, too. Further to Constantinople, former Ballydoyle inmates with designs on the Cup include Houseman, Rostropovich and Yucatan. O’Brien himself has Hunting Horn, Il Paradiso, Magic Wand and Southern France engaged, while his son Joseph is responsible for Downdraft, Latrobe, Master Of Reality and Twilight Payment.

They won’t all run, of course, but it says everything about the contemporary influence of the father-and-son axis that a dozen credible contenders for a race 10,000 miles from Ireland have passed through O’Brien hands.

It also demonstrates how successful the Victoria Racing Club has been in promoting the Cup to an international audience. Any Aussie reticence at the massed ranks of invaders pays no heed to how dire the quality of the race would be were it a purely domestic affair.

But perhaps the most striking message from the Melbourne Cup in the 21st century is how quickly the canvas can change. Those redoubtable Aussie gallopers of yesteryear are no longer. They have been replaced by sprinters whose exploits 50 years ago would barely have resonated in a country with a once-proud history of staying horses.

The BHA was right to incentivise the production of middle-distance and staying horses in Britain even though they still dominate abroad. The slope gets more slippery the longer it goes untended; in just half a century Australia has regressed from championing their cause to presiding over their extinction. Where would the Melbourne Cup be in the visitors’ absence?

[flockofewes2 216]

Its a wonder Hunting Horn is not down under for the MC,he's accepted for just about every other international event!

[Maximus 429]

good article ...though Houseman should be Homesman ...