Damning the Golden Slipper as an "abomination", racing identity Terry Henderson has called for Australian breeders and trainers to devote themselves again to the distance races that historically were this country's most coveted and still comprise nearly all of the classics here.
Henderson partners Simon O'Donnell in OTI, which imports international horses and has four runners in Tuesday's Melbourne Cup. He says he abhors suggestions of a cap on internationals to avert a takeover, saying Australians instead should concentrate on producing staying horses to match the internationals and so return racing to its heyday.
"As it is now, there's still a major emphasis on short, two- and three-year-old races," Henderson said. "It all changed in the 1950s when they invented this abomination of a race called the Golden Slipper. That became the holy grail of early racing, and as result of that, the breeding industry.
"That competely wrecked our staying breeds. We were exporting stayers to Europe before the 1950s. It's a shame it went the way it's gone. It meant you could make some money out of horses quicker because you can race them as two- and three-year-olds. You shorten the cycle. The trainers then train to race those sort of horses. The whole movement, if you like, was towards shorter distance racing - even though our classics are all middle distance or for stayers."
Henderson said that a tariff on the Melbourne Cup would put at risk its hard-won reputation as one of the world's great races. He noted that it wasn't as if the Europeans had had the race given to them on a platter. "It's taken the Europeans a long time to get around the idea of the Melbourne Cup being a handicap," he said. "They still have trouble with it, because there's no other handicaps of this nature in the world. So to think in terms of putting a cap on it is just silly."
Rather, Australian trainers had to learn to work with the generally better bred, but more delicate European horses. Slowly, they are. "The last two Melbourne Cups have been won by European horses trained by Australians," he said. "Hopefully, our breeders will realise that if they want to play in this sort of market, they've got to breed these sorts of horses."
