The Wellington Hiccup

I’ve written about it long and often enough on this blog and the prophecy continues fulfilling itself. The Wellington Cup, once THE great race of New Zealand, has been reduced in distance from 3200m to 2400m.

It’s called ‘moving with the times’, a euphemism for ‘inevitable weakening of the breed’.

Those of you planning on living another 50 years, bone up on your quarter horse pedigrees, you’ll need them.

There is nothing sacrosanct about 3200m but as a recognised extreme test for a flat racing thoroughbred, if you don’t count the longer races in England and France, it has its place. I don’t see the marathon being expunged from the Olympic programme any time soon.

The problem in all this, in my opinion, is that the Group race system (or the Pattern Races as they should be more properly described) has become a device by which racing clubs advertise their idea of their own prestige rather than as a pure servant of the breed. It was devised in order to lay down a logical pathway of competition in which horses could be tested through which breeders and buyers would have a ready means of understanding racing merit. I have some knowledge of this, I led the introduction of the system into NZ in 1979.

Because the races ‘belonged’ to the clubs, inevitably they wanted to take ownership of the process as much as they could as their ‘prestige’ was at stake. When Stakes Subsidy Fund monies were then attached to the Groupings the process became highly politicised. Where the money goes is where the breed goes.

I’ve read that a justification for reducing the Wellington Cup distance from 3200m to 2400m is to try and regain its Group 1 status (it has been relegated to Group 2). That ought not to be an end in itself and illustrates how the system gets perverted.

Since the gulf between spring NZ and Australian prizemoney became so marked post-1990, retaining high quality older horses, especially stayers, to compete in NZ through the late spring and summer became problematic. This caused a gradual reduction in the numbers of proven superior horses available for the Wellington Cup (which is the second, not the first, 3200m race at Trentham to have its distance reduced).

I have the greatest reservation about ANY handicap being a Group 1 race. I also think racing clubs as we know them should be abolished (that’s a yarn for another day but every time I look at those Gestapo-guarded empty seats at Randwick opposite the winning post my opinion becomes even more entrenched). Before I left NZ I recall a survey in Auckland which showed members attended their race meetings on average 2.5 times per year. It’s probably not even that at Randwick and certainly not at Warwick Farm. What a waste of resources. But don’t get me going on that.

One of the most competitive and publicly-appreciated races in Britain is the Ebor Handicap over 2800m at York, the richest handicap in Europe. The fact that it is Group Nothing doesn't matter.

In the days when TAB betting closed 30 minutes before the off, when TAB tickets were handwritten by an agent behind a grille with carbon paper used to produce a copy, when the amounts bet had to be rung through to TAB headquarters so dividends could be calculated, that was when the Wellington Cup was the great race of NZ, its history saturated with the deeds of the great and immortal.

This was a time before the socio-economic drift to the north became pronounced, when the prizemoney at the Wellington summer carnival was so compelling you had to travel from anywhere in either island if you had a horse with half a chance. They were the days when the National Yearling Sale was held at the northern end of the Trentham track during Cup Week. If you were selling a relative of the Oaks, Derby or even the Cup winner, you could double your reserve and get it.

With the senility that comes with advancing years, my sense now is that those were pretty good days. In some respects its a pity the younger people of today will never experience those more sedate, more innocent times when all we had to worry about was obliteration by the H-bomb and not to forget to take The Pill.

The last two runnings of the Wellington Cup have attracted capacity fields of 18 runners. The recent roll call of winners – Cyclades, Oarsman, Cluden Creek, Zabeat, Envoy, Willie Smith and Young Centaur – is a Who’s That? rather than a Who’s Who or racing but that really doesn’t matter. The club should have continued carding the race at 3200m as the field fills easily enough, fund the race to the best of its ability and continue to promote it innovatively because by its very nature it’s not a run-of-the-mill race. The club’s pride might be hurt in ‘losing’ a Group 1 but that’s not the end-all-and-be-all.