Australia Wide – The interview that never was

Before this weekend I e-mailed Australia Wide who agreed to do an interview to compliment the one i did with Mb Stables last week. I sent ten questions to him and said i would follow up with additional questions as things cropped up. All was going well until i received a mail saying, and i quote, “I read the questions. I’ve answered them many times. Interview someone more current. I’ve nothing to add.” Confused by this response i wondered what could have happened and went to the forums to try and find a reason for this change of heart.
It didn’t take long to find a thread titled ‘Bojangles’ and in it an entry from Australia Wide saying “I’m a very ordinary owner here. I don’t need my arm twisted. I’ve been saying it for a long time. This is a one owner site. We’re competing for crumbs. There’s the odd anomaly, some crumbs are bigger than others but everyone here other than the Whale is Plankton. Play to your means / restrictions and have fun. If it’s not fun, leave. No need for than interview Thresh, I just did it : )”

So it seems Australia Wide clearly believes that the size and quality of Mb’s Stable is suffocating the game, a viewpoint that is held by a few and refuted by others.

I wondered therefore how true this was and decided to have a look at this weekend in an attempt to come to some conclusion myself. The weekend consisted of 14 graded stakes races. Mb Stables had a total of 23 runners in those 14 races and won 50% of them with 7 wins, including four of the eight grade ones. This is indeed an enviable record but with 16 losers coming from the stable it didn’t seem to spell the monopoly that is alluded to by some.
Now there are two ways at looking at every fact that is presented and it is very easy to see that on some level the size and quality of the stable is indeed stifling others when it comes to profiting at the game. We all know how hard it is to run a stable on overnight racing alone. The profit margins are so tight that even with a one in three win rate it is hard to break even. It is widely known that the only way to make money to either profit or pump back into the game is by winning the graded stakes races as they tend to have a much better profit margin. When one stable wins seven of the fourteen races it leaves only seven to be shared amongst all the other players in the game and that is effectively how a monopoly works.

So are Australia Wide and others crying foul when no foul has been made or have they got a point? There is certainly no blame to be laid at Mb Stables door. His accomplishments are amazing in a game that has become harder and harder to consistently win at with any individual horse. Having the amount of quality horses that they have and the resulting spending power when it comes to buying and breeding horses is a rolling ball we would all like to be on. So my first conclusion is that like him or hate him it is in no way the fault of Mb Stables.

So is there a fault or is this just an example of success breeding success? Let”s look at the racing itself.
The subject of the forum in which I found out why Australia Wide didn’t want to be interviewed was ‘Bojangles’ and related to a much touted horse that Australia Wide owned. That horse ran in the Jockey Club Gold Cup and went into the race with a decent draw and four wins in a row including the grade one Travers. He had recent works of 57 and 2 for the five furlongs and 1.36 and 3 for the mile, all pretty good if you compared him to the eventual winner trained by Mb Stables. That horse was Enshrined. Drawn 8 and beaten a length in The Woodward and The Whitney in his prior starts he had also worked a 57 and 2 for the five furlongs and a 1.36 and 3 for the mile. So realistically there was very little between the runners and yet Enshrined finished first and Bo Jangles finished eleventh. Of course there are factors that made the difference in the result, the slightly off track would probably be cited as the main reason but at the end of the day you would be hard pushed to say one was favoured by the surface more than the other. So with all the horses so very close in ability how can you improve your chances of winning these big races? Well the most obvious way is to buy more tickets to the party and with 21% of the runners Mb certainly had a greater statistical chance of winning, especially as all three of his runners were running similar work times.
Of course that is simplifying things a little bit too much because just putting any three horses in a race would not give you a better chance of winning but it does support the way of thinking that the more tickets you have the better chance you have.
The other factor would be instructions. Are instructions really the only difference between the horses at HRP? And as they are never known beyond the individual stable can we be sure they are the reason for success or failure?

I guess the only conclusion I can reach at the end of this is that there is certainly an advantage in owning more horses and there is certainly an advantage in entering more horses in a race that have a chance of winning. Is any of that Mb Stables fault, no. If there is any fault at all it must be laid at the door of the game developers but even in doing that you would be hard pressed to make a case that it is their fault at all. To blame them would be to blame a government for the domination of the McDonalds brand and you cannot blame legislators for allowing success.

So at the end of the day you either do what a few stables are starting to do which is spend hard cash in an effort to copy this brand of success or you accept your position in the food chain if you want to play at HRP. It is certainly a difficult choice to make and a bitter pill to swallow but unless Mb Stables is the last player left at HRP nothing much will change.

Categories: FEATURED STORIES, SRF Interviews