As many people may have heard the Stradbroke handicap will be getting a prize money increase in the coming years. The winner will now receive $1,000,000 and there is also talk of changing the conditions of the race.
This is where I think they can take a step back and consider some tradition. The fact it is a handicap is what makes the Stradbroke the Stradbroke, the same way the Melbourne Cup is built up as the biggest staying handicap. The Cox Plate is built up as the best WFA test in Australasia and always will be. Can you imagine if they were going to get changed?? To think you raise the prize money and then change the whole make-up of a race is crazy to me, why not change the name as it won’t be the same race!
Many are saying you will get the best WFA horses here if you make it a WFA race. That may be true, but do you honestly think the best horses wouldn’t run if it was $1 million to the winner? PLEASE. The weights would compress a little and you would get just as good of a field but with more interest with punters loving the fact it is a handicap race and trying to find the well weighted horses on the way up. There are a stack of WFA races over the Sydney carnival over the sprint trips so let’s stick to our strengths which is offering an extremely high class handicap where trainers from over Australia can target the race with their untapped and rising stars like Private Steer and La Montagna were as 3 year old fillies.
I do hear a lot of QLD people saying they would much rather see the money go towards midweek races in Brisbane/Gold coast etc instead of raising one race to that huge sum and most likely head south with visiting trainers. To a certain point I agree with that but I can understand the thinking behind the $1,000,000 1st prize.
At the end of the day all I am saying is with that amount of coin getting put up the best horses will come and run, there is absolutely no need to change the conditions of our greatest race.
Let’s just hope that more prize money can be found in the very near future for midweeks and Saturday’s to help us compete with the southern states. That is what this state really needs and until we can get more done to help our trainers and owners we are simply falling further behind Sydney and Melbourne who are consistently making their products better and raising their prize money to levels that leave us for dead…..