Winning Post

This week in Winning Post

This week's Winning Post will be available here from 3pm AEDT Thursday.

Flemington may be over but the Melbourne carnival kicks on, with Sandown hosting the Group 1 C.F. Orr Stakes, newly transferred from February.

Chris Waller's Yulong-owned five-year-old Angel Capital will be among the chances to grab the final major of the Melbourne spring.

Elsewhere Newcastle takes centre stage in NSW for The Hunter while it's Keith Noud day at Doomben.

The action is heating up out west too, with the $500,000 Placid Ark Stakes one of five black-type races on the Ascot program.

Winning Post will have full coverage of both meetings and plenty more.

Our coverage kicks off on Friday with fields, colours and tips for all eight Friday TAB meetings.

The metro racing this Saturday is at Sandown in Melbourne, Newcastle in NSW, Morphettville in Adelaide, Doomben in Brisbane and Ascot in Perth.

Winning Post carries full-colour liftout guides for all those meetings plus Dunkeld (Vic/SA edition), Illawarra Grange (NSW edition) and the Gold Coast (Qld edition), as well as fields, tips, ratings and/or colours for other TAB Saturday cards.

On Sunday we've got liftout formguides for three more TAB meetings (plus Hobart in the Tassie edition) as well as fields, ratings, tips and colours for a stack more Sunday and Monday programs.

Don't forget Winning Post now carries trackwork reports for all four Melbourne training tracks, all three in Sydney, Morphettville in Adelaide and a general Brisbane report.

Away from the form, we've got news columns from NSW, six Victorian districts, SA and Tasmania.

Our readers have their say on page 5, while further back in the book Shane Templeton reminisces, Paul Richards presents his unique take on the sport and John Wathen-Berry wraps up the international scene.

Winning Post costs $7 and is available Thursday afternoon online ($6), the crack of dawn Friday in shops.

... More

Out on a high .................................................................................................................................................

Download the calendar .................................................................................................................................................

Tasmania: Boogie gets down to business .................................................................................................................................................

Wimmera: Martin puts on a clinic at Wyche .................................................................................................................................................

Central Victoria: Raiders rule, Stacey's got it goin' on .................................................................................................................................................

More Stories

Inside Winning Post November 7 edition you'll find liftout form guides for:

Saturday:

Sandown, Newcastle, Morphettville, Doomben, Ascot, Dunkeld (Vic/SA edition), Illawarra Grange (NSW edition), Gold Coast (Qld edition)

Sunday:

Moe, Donald, Wyong, Hobart (Tas edition)

Eye Catchers

Each week Paul Richards identifies horses from recent race meetings that he believes are ready to win. Here we update you when they are about to have their next start.

Rosehill Gardens Saturday - R7 N3 Gerringong 2nd

Rosehill Gardens Saturday - R8 N1 Linebacker 9th

Flemington Saturday - R5 N7 Zuleika 8th

Flemington Saturday - R5 N12 Sun Gift 1st

Flemington Saturday - R6 N7 Joliestar 6th

Results

Letter of the Week

Hands off our derby

In all the annual boring chat about shortening the Victoria Derby, one fact seemed to be lost.
That is, there’s already a 2000-metre Group 1 for spring three-year-olds.
The Spring Champion Stakes is worth $2 million, not that far short of the derby’s $3 million, yet this year it attracted just nine runners, only seven of whom were males.
The fillies — who presumably wouldn’t have been in the target market for a 2000-metre Victoria Derby because the Oaks is run five days later — ran one-two at $3.70 and $2.80.
It was basically a match race.
Then you had Warwoven and Blind Raise running in the Cox Plate. Everyone assumes they would have run in the derby if it had been 2000 metres.
But would they really have bypassed the $6 million Cox Plate, carrying 49.5kg in a field with no obvious standout, to run in the $3 million Victoria Derby?
And they wouldn’t have backed up from the Cox Plate into the derby because by that time we knew they can’t run 2000 metres, never mind 2500.
The Victoria Derby, which drew a full field as always, was a far more interesting race than the Spring Champion.
It had the first two males home from the Spring Champion, the first two from the Vase, the first four from the Caulfield Classic, the first two from the Geelong Classic — and, as a bonus, the Ethereal winner.
In other words, it was a proper championship race for spring staying three-year-olds.
Is that not the whole point of Group 1 status — as opposed to all the warm-up Group 1s on our calendar like the Winx, the Memsie and the Surround?
History says the Victoria Derby winner is just as likely to turn out a top horse as the Spring Champion winner.
Crazy idea, but maybe our own pattern committee should try getting its own act together rather than handballing the assessment of our races to an overseas body with no apparent idea about Australian racing.
A simple and obvious solution is to move the Spring Champion back to Everest day to give its runners 14 days into the derby.
Swap it with the ATC St Leger, which would thus give any Melbourne Cup aspirants from that race a 10-day lead-in.
It would seem to me that with Peter V’landys stepping down from Racing NSW in September, the main impediment to such a development is gone.

Mitch Matheson
Castlemaine (Vic)