October
MayJewel shone brightest
I’ll be interested to see the result of your poll this week about Australia’s champion mare for 2013/14, and how it compares to the final result in September.
My guess is that Streama will win both the Winning Post poll and the award, but I’m not convinced that’s the right result.
I believe Atlantic Jewel stands out as the best performed mare in Australia this season.
Both she and Streama had three wins for the season — two Group 1s and a Group 2.
The Group 1 races they won were roughly equivalent. Neither the Memsie (Atlantic Jewel) and the George Main (Streama) are championship races, but there were plenty of Group 1 winners among the beaten brigade in both events.
The Caulfield Stakes (Atlantic Jewel) and Doomben Cup (Streama) also had much in common — both were badly substandard runnings of time-honoured 2000-metre weight-for-age races. The Caulfield Stakes that Atlantic Jewel won was exceptionally poor, but the mare can’t be held responsible for programming problems or the fact that she scared several serious rivals away.
Streama perhaps has the advantage when we’re comparing the mares’ Group 2 wins, as the weight-for-age $350,000 Hollindale would normally be a stronger credential than the mares-only $220,000 Stocks Stakes, but again it wasn’t exactly a vintage Hollindale, with an out-of-form Fat Al the only other Group 1 winner in the field.
The difference between the two mares’ seasons in my opinion is that Streama was beaten seven times in 2013/14, and was unplaced on five of those occasions.
Atlantic Jewel had only four starts for the season, with her only defeat coming by a nose in a Group 1 race at the hands of subsequent $4 million Queen Elizabeth Stakes winner It’s a Dundeel. Even that defeat was arguably a result more of the tactics employed by the jockeys concerned than by any weakness on Atlantic Jewel’s part.
Past experience suggests that two factors tend to distort the results of Australia’s Racehorse of the Year awards.
The first is time. It seems the judging panel has the attention span of a five-year-old on Red Bull, and as a result performances in the autumn tend to count for double those in the spring.
The second is sentiment, which to me is the only explanation for Black Caviar winning her third Horse of the Year title last season, when her half-brother All Too Hard had clearly superior form credentials for that year.
Obviously Streama’s performances will be fresher in the judges’ mind than Atlantic Jewel’s, and no doubt she will have sentiment on her side after the tragic passing of the great Guy Walter.
I suspect those factors will be enough to give her the nod, and she would be a worthy winner, but I believe the (almost) unbeaten Atlantic Jewel was in a class of her own.
Glebe (NSW)