I Wish I Win.
Australia’s richest race has become New Zealand racing’s Battle of the Giants.
In one corner stands Waikato Stud, breeders and majority owners of I Wish I Win, the first Kiwi rep ever in the A$20 million Everest when he finished second last year.
In the other corner, fighting in the gold and black checks of Cambridge Stud, the most storied nursery in New Zealand racing history now owned by Brendan and Jo Lindsay, is Joliestar.
She is now the favourite for the mega money slot race at 6.15pm (NZ time) at Randwick tonight.
As New Zealand’s two biggest stud farms Waikato and Cambridge are used to being direct competitors for New Zealand’s best broodmares or in the sales ring at Karaka.
But they weren’t supposed to be winning The Everest.
The Everest was set up to showcase Australian sprinting prowess in a country obsessed by speed stallions and speedier returns.
There is delicious irony in the fact I Wish I Win is by Waikato Stud’s champion sire Savabeel while should Joliestar win the Everest heroine will one day join the broodmare band at Cambridge Stud.
Rivals they may be but in a country as small as New Zealand even staunchest of rivals work together. Many stud takes shares (breeding rights) in each other’s stallions, partly because it is good of the industry but also because they can’t afford to miss the boat if a stallion becomes a hit.
So as much as each entity would love to win today’s 1200m explosion of speed, if one of the Kiwis can’t win you get the feeling they would take some pride in the other one taking out the Everest.
Who has the better chance could come down to tempo, luck and rain.
Joliestar is class, racing at home in Sydney, has Chris Waller and James McDonald in her camp and there is a sense of timing about her bid.
She is probably more a 1400m mare than a sheer sprint queen but a hard-run Randwick 1200m can play like 1400m and if she sits midfield and lets loose at the 300m, Cambridge Stud and the Lindsays may sit atop of the mountain.
I Wish I Win would like even more tempo, as he will settle back from barrier 9 and hope the dazzling three-year-olds up front burn too brightly.
Born with legs like a broken piano, I Wish I Win wouldn’t have even made it to the track if he didn’t have huge heart so a frenetic Everest with the sting out of the track to cushion his aging joints could see him go one better.
If he does the NZ TAB will have pulled off one of the great marketing coups in racing history, winning the Everest sponsored by the Australian TAB with a horse racing for the rival New Zealand TAB and its partner Entain.
Make no mistake, to the people involved in those huge corporations, Everest bragging rights really, really matter.
But today’s Everest is far more than the NZ racing’s Battle of the Giants. It is global racing’s Land of the Giants.
As big as Cambridge and Waikato Studs are they are taking on the superpowers of world racing: Coolmore, Godolphin and new kids on the block Yulong, who collect trophy horses like most people buy a cup of coffee.
These are people, families or businesses that own oil fields and all the land around them, airlines and breweries.
They race to conquer and today they each have a 3-year-old colt (Storm Boy, Traffic Warden, Growing Empire respectively) in the Everest and if they win the stake money won’t matter anywhere as much as the future stallion value.
The best of them, maybe the best bet in the race, might be Growing Empire who has the greatest gift an equine can have: raw speed.
If he sits midfield with cover he could do something dramatic and cap Yulong’s incredible ascension up the global thoroughbred rankings.
But today two horses who will one day retire to the good life is a lush Waikato paddock will take on the biggest players in world racing in front of a 46,000-strong sellout crowd.
Victory for either would instantly propel today to being one of the proudest in New Zealand’s long racing history.
The Everest is a horse race, run and won in under 70 seconds.
But it is also something else.
It is our giants taking on their giants.
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.
What: The world’s richest race on turf.
Where: Randwick, Sydney
How much: A$20million
Distance: 1200m.
Who: 12 of the fastest horses in Australia.
The Kiwis: I Wish I Win and Joliestar.
Your chance: The TAB is holding a free competition to select the correct finishing order. If you do, you could win $10million.
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.