Paul Kent: Winx not slowing down as the finish line approaches
Champion mare Winx is showing no signs of slowing down. She is still winning, still so dominant, so why retire her at all?
The touts say she is better than bank interest, although that tip is being sorely tested.
Winx was $1.06 overnight and when sentiment comes late, as it always does, she threatens to take the return on investment down to a place that would make even the banks weep.
Even after the year they’ve had.
Meantime, she goes around on Saturday like she always does, carrying the hopes and spare change of the small and the big alike.
Something happens to people when the great racehorses come along.
Phar Lap came along in time of Depression. Much of the country was jobless. Despite that most found a way to have something on the great horse because he had the ability to turn a little into a little bit more.
And because he could be relied upon, he became something more.
Winx is like that.
We fell in love with her somewhere in the home stretch of her 31-straight wins, which takes in a record four WS Cox Plates, a world record 23 Group 1 wins. Recognition as Australian Horse of the Year three times. The World Best Racehorse last year (tie). The Best Horse on Turf, and so it goes …
We don’t just simply admire her. You admire fast cars and Olympic champions and footballers who can pick your pocket.
With Winx, it goes beyond.
Only last month hundreds turned up to an empty Randwick racecourse, with the races on across the city, simply to watch her in an exhibition gallop. The gallop was broadcast on radio.
The great horses defy reason. It makes no sense. Many obsessed by Winx have never seen her in the flesh.
She is unremarkable to look at. A bay horse, she is as plain as a brown paper bag. Handsome but hardly pretty, although the people who know these things are drawn to her eye. There is intelligence in her eye, they say.
The only clue to her greatness, according to trainer Chris Waller, and it really is just a guess, is a “long hind leg”, which Waller believes creates a bigger lever to help her stretch while galloping.
Form analysts believe her greatness is her stride rate. Average racehorses roll through about 140 strides per minute. Winx, nostrils flaring, hits 170 strides per minute. Coupled with fatigue, which sees the merely mortal horses begin to labour under race pressure, Winx maintains her stride rate.
Never mind that, though. Logic and reason kill romance.
For some years now her price has got so short she is hardly worth a bet unless it was for sentiment or, at the other end, the outlay was enough to return a small home deposit. One punter has so far risked $1.2 million to win just $153,000.
Casual fans might not even be able to explain what they see when she races, they just know they like it. She is so reliable, so honest in her runs.
So she runs out on Saturday, overshadowing the world’s richest two-year-old race, the Golden Slipper, as she has done these past few years.
It will be the second last time she ever races. Her owners, with Waller’s support, announced last year that this autumn would be Winx’s last campaign.
She is the $1.06 favourite in the George Ryder Stakes (1500m) and will back up again in a fortnight in the Queen Elizabeth (2000m) at Randwick where the grandstand will be on her, down to the last dollar.
The Queen Elizabeth exists to remind us that there is no certainty in racing, that sentiment is a poor tipster.
More than once the Queen Elizabeth has broken hearts. Lonhro and his sire Octagonal both lost their final races in the Queen Elizabeth. The crowd, decorated in cerise caps each time, got a stiff lesson in anti-climax. Gunsynd was another where the Queen Elizabeth was not kind, losing his final race there also.
Winx is a better racehorse than them, though, and already Royal Randwick is gearing up for her farewell.
Yet it is enough to prompt the question: with Winx still winning, still so dominant, why retire her at all?
There seems little doubt that if she was to resume in the spring a fifth Cox Plate would be there for the taking.
Unlike Octagonal and Lonhro, both stallions, she has no absurd stud value. She has no idea of her record. Even if she were to lose one race and break her winning streak, would that be so bad?
Mostly, she suffers none of the problems that brought the past champions back to mortality.
By the end of his racing career Kingston Town was like a tired heavyweight champion, somehow willing his way through injury to find a way to win. For others, like Might And Power, the ending was abrupt and unexpected, his career over when he found a hole on the track and bowed a tendon mid-race.
But Winx, a seven-year-old now, is not hampered by injury. She has endured none of the wars Kingston Town endured or even Octagonal, who came through with a rare class that included Saintly, Filante and Nothin’ Leica Dane.
Only once this campaign has jockey Hugh Bowman had to ask for her all. Indeed, Bowman could count on his whip hand the number of times in her career he has had to ask her for a full effort.
She has won on good tracks and heavy tracks, going in different directions, from 1400m to 2200m. She has beaten everyone they care to put in front of her.
The reasons to continue racing her are many and legitimate and yet don’t stand a chance against the reasons to retire her.
Add it all up and, mostly, we want her to continue because we simply don’t want it to end.
But she will be eight next campaign, a year older and a year closer to being beaten. Heroes are hard enough to find and believe in without contributing to their downfall.
The only people, to use the term loosely, happy to see Winx leave the racetracks forever will be the bookies.
They have been copping a bath from Winx and her supporting army for 31 straight wins now.
It would be nice to see it continue, but all things must end.
SHORT SHOTS
As expected, news the NRL is examining expansion has caused the usual knee-jerk reactions.
Cronulla fans think Wests Tigers should relocate and Tigers fans think it should be Manly, while Sea Eagles fans nominate the Dragons, whose fans question the future of Cronulla Sharks.
Or some variation of that.
The game needs to be very careful that it does not simply accept accepted thinking as fact.
Perth won’t be the financial windfall many believe it will be, for example.
As far as the broadcasters go, a 9.30pm (AEST) game in Perth is no different to a late 9.30pm game in Sydney or Brisbane or Townsville.
Nine clubs in Sydney might be too many, but would viewers prefer to watch two current Sydney teams play or a soon-to-be-made-up team with little history in the game?
That might affect the broadcast deal.
The NRL will point to the sellout crowd at Origin this year as proof that an appetite exists in Perth for rugby league.
But Melbourne provides similar crowd numbers when Origin comes to town, yet Storm failed to sell out their season-opener last weekend against the heavyweight Brisbane Broncos when the AFL season had yet to begin.
Melbourne have survived only because News Corp (publishers of The Saturday Telegraph) invested close to $100 million in the club, according to its reports. And that’s the point.
Without a long-term investment strategy, any expansion will fail.
To make the investment work, the NRL will have to hold back money currently designated for clubs to help prop up the expansion team.
Will the clubs agree?
Will self-interest rule?
It is a delicate conversation.
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