Winning Post

This week in Winning Post

This week's Winning Post is now available online here.

An intriguing final day is sure to see this year's Flemington carnival go out on a high note this Saturday.

The sixth edition of Champions day may rival Derby day for quality, with the Darley Champions Sprint (formerly the VRC Sprint Classic), Champions Mile (ex Cantala) and Champions Stakes (ex Mackinnon) offering scads of intrigue and drama.

A galaxy of stars will be on show across the three big races.

Meanwhile in Sydney the five-year-olds duke it out in the $2 million Five Diamonds, the two-year-olds match motors in the $1 million Golden Gift and the fillies and mares clash in the $500,000 Hot Danish.

Our form coverage kicks off on Friday with a full form guide for Cranbourne, plus fields, colours and tips for the other Friday TAB meetings.

The metro racing this Saturday is at Flemington in Melbourne, Rosehill in Sydney, Morphettville in Adelaide, Eagle Farm in Brisbane and Ascot in Perth.

Winning Post carries full-colour liftout guides for all those meetings plus Geelong (Vic/SA/Tas edition), Hawkesbury (NSW edition) and 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 two more TAB meetings 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 Queensland, 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 Number Cruncher delivers the stats that matter.

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

... More

Podcast: Champions day .................................................................................................................................................

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 .................................................................................................................................................

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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.

There are no Eye Catchers this week

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)