Winning Post - Letter Of The Week Archive

I am replying to the comments made by Alfie Law regarding Karasi (26/8).
The reason Karasi wasn’t included among the best 12 Australian steeplechasers of the metric era was that the horse never won a steeplechase in Australia.
I considered it was unfair to include the horse in the field, as all the others had the common denominator of having won over fences here.
It was the best Australian Steeplechase field since metrics.
In the 1970s and 80s top horses came from New Zealand to compete here and their form had to be included to be able to weight the horses.
The argument on prizemoney earned is simply ridiculous.
Karasi raced in a country where there are no bookmakers, no midweek racing, and a tote without competition that has a 25-percent takeout, so prizemoney is stratospheric compared to here.
Maiden steeplechase races in Japan are run for $400,000.
Prizemoney comparisons are a silly way to line horses up as was suggested. When Strasbourg won the Grand National Steeplechase it was worth $20,000, a far cry from today’s race worth $350,000.
If prizemoney was the factor, a horse like Regina Coeli would be high in the all-time earners list, but far from the top group of horses of the last 40 years.
Even though overseas performances were mentioned for a number of the runners, they had no bearing on the weight they were allocated.
I had no way of sourcing the performances of the horses overseas.
The exercise was meant to compare horses that raced over jumps in this part of the world over an extended period.
These type of comparisons will always be subjective, and the only real way of comparing the horses was by races won and by weights carried above the minimum.
Prizemoney had to be excluded.
So, had Karasi won a race here, he could have been compared with the other horses selected.
The Nakayama Grand Jump, while it was the world’s richest race, failed to attract much international competition and dropped off the radar of trainers outside of Japan after a couple of runnings of the race.
That is not to denigrate Karasi’s great performance but he had an opportunity that was not available to the steeplechasers of the years prior, nor to the current horses.
In retrospect I should have included Karasi in the hurdle field.