“He didn’t go well enough last Friday so I’d rather see him in the paddock than having a hard 3200m.”
That New Zealand’s two best pacers who are racing (Copy That, Akuta and Millwood Nike are all injured) will miss the once-great Auckland Cup suggests two things.
Firstly, it comes at the wrong time of the season and secondly, with a total stake of $250,000, it has fallen too far down the list of priorities for the trainers of our best pacers.
The Cup, once second only to the New Zealand Cup as our most important harness race, has bounced around between New Year’s Eve, March and even February in the past 20 years but when the harness racing season was changed to the calendar year two years ago it was moved to late May.
It was supposed to be the culmination of a wonderful northern open class circuit starting in March and taking in the new $1 million Race by Grins slot race. But while the autumn carnival, on the whole, has produced some excellent racing from often small fields, the Cup simply feels too late.
Don’t Stop Dreaming has already raced at Alexandra Park on New Year’s Eve, then Melton in the Hunter Cup, the Sydney carnival including the Chariots of Fire and Miracle Mile and then back to New Zealand where he finished second to Merlin in the Race by Grins.
He then started in the Taylor Mile, Messenger and the Roy Purdon and looked like a tired horse at different stages during that 12-race campaign.
Merlin seemed to hold his form slighty better but also looked past his peak during Taylor-Messenger double defeats and tellingly both horse’s trainers have said enough is enough, suggesting an Auckland Cup bid potentially jeopardises the second half of the year.
The Auckland Trotting Club is keen to move the race from its current date and has suggested a return to December 31 or earlier in the autumn carnival.
“We think it is simply too late in the autumn and too many of the good horses are getting tired,” says ATC president Jamie MacKinnon.
“The fact our two best 4-year-olds aren’t going to be there this week backs that up.”
Dates aside the other issue is money, with horses such as Don’t Stop Dreaming and Merlin able to target at least seven other major races in New Zealand or on Australia’s Eastern Seaboard worth more than the Auckland Cup, most of which also come with richer lead-up races.
While the Auckland Cup without New Zealand’s best pacers feels hollow it has at least produced an even, if small, field of eight so won’t be a disaster as a betting product.
Friday night’s meeting will also benefit from Australia’s champion trotter Just Believe sticking around for the $200,000 Reharvest Rowe Cup to add some glamour and attract some Australian eyeballs.
Add in the $110,000 Breckon Farms Trotting Derby and the night is still a good one.
It could just be so much better and deserves to be.
Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald’s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world’s biggest horse racing carnivals.
