Raiders’ dominance is turning spring carnival into the Wimbledon of horse racing

THE Melbourne spring carnival is becoming the Wimbledon of world horse racing, Matt Stewart writes.

International Horse's trackwork at Werribee Racecourse, Melbourne. Cox Plate winner Adelaide has a look at the plate held up by Charlie Magnier son of Tom Magnier from Coolmore,. 26th October 2014. Picture: Colleen Petch.

THE Melbourne spring carnival is becoming the Wimbledon of world horse racing.

The Brits won every Wimbledon from 1877 until 1904, but then the competition got hotter. The world started playing tennis.

Until Andy Murray won in 2013, Fred Perry was the most recent British man to win at home — in 1936.

Tim Henman loomed and faded once or twice and Virginia Wade won back in 1977 — the last homegrown winner of the fillies’ division.

Our carnival, in the races that really count — the middle-distance and staying races up to and including the Melbourne Cup — is becoming a handsome opportunity for raiders to plunder.

As the competition has widened, much like at Wimbledon a century ago, our inadequacies have been exposed.

They have been exposed elsewhere as well. Two internationals turned up for The Championships at Randwick in the autumn.

Ireland’s Gordon Lord Byron and Japanese miler Hana’s Goal were hardly glamorous arrivals yet they defeated the best that we could muster.

Down here, the Japanese have needed only a sniff to carve us up. Two good-to-average Japanese stayers lobbed in 2006 and ran our hotchpotch stayers ragged in the Melbourne Cup.

It’s a good thing Makybe Diva bowed out after 2005 because Delta Blues and Pop Rock would have represented an unprecedented challenge for our greatest staying mare.

Quarantine red tape kept the Japanese stayers offshore for a while, until this year.

Admire Rakti, a handy horse at best back home, raced wide and whacked our best in the Caulfield Cup the same day two recent imports ran the quinella in the David Jones Cup.

Caravan Rolls On, another import, beat another import, Marksmanship, in the Geelong Cup last week and on Saturday a wayward, immature, promising but untapped colt called Adelaide defied weight, age, a wide barrier and a saucer track to flog our cobbled-together best in the Cox Plate.

Irish trainer Aidan O’Brien will keep launching Cox Plate assaults now he has tasted ­victory and the Japanese are poised to return.

Melbourne Cup betting markets reveal the crippled state of our ranks. Beyond the sprint division, which is so strong, it is lopsided.

Of the top 20 horses in Cup betting, eight are trained internationally, seven are former internationals now trained and predominantly owned here, four are New Zealand-bred or trained and just one, Fawkner, is the product of the local breeding and racing scene.

Just one. In 20.

There are expected to be 12 foreign-trained Cup runners tomorrow week.

We started plundering the European market for tried horses only a few years back. Imagine the sad state of our staying ranks if people such as Chris Waller had been more insular.

The staying races of Sydney would be full of slow sprint-bred locals gasping at the end of 2000m.

A few months back Lee Freedman and David Hayes pondered our predicament.

They wondered why the great geldings of previous eras — Super Impose, Better Loosen Up and so on — no longer existed.

Big international breeders have cornered a market once shared with smaller farms, the ones that tended to produce the great gallopers who were so plainly bred that they were invariably gelded, so unimpressive they were rarely rushed to the track.

Both Freedman and Hayes speculated that we rush our horses too early and breed them soft.

The result is they either race soft or are retired early; pushed so hard from the start that they never mature slowly to become well-rounded ­stayers, like the Japanese and Europeans.

The European horses share similar bloodlines to ours because of sire shuttling, but they are prepared and nurtured very differently.

Galileo was a flop at stud here because we lacked the patience for his stock to mature, and probably lacked the races for his progeny to contest.

In Europe, Galileo is ­probably the greatest sire of all time.

It’s Fawkner versus the world in the Melbourne Cup. In eight days time he will ­either be Tim Henman or Andy Murray.

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Originally published as Raiders’ dominance is turning spring carnival into the Wimbledon of horse racing