Winning Post - Letter Of The Week Archive

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.