"TROT TACTICS"...04/12/2010..
Blacks A Fake had to be content with being magnificent in defeat when beaten by Smoken Up in last Saturday's Miracle Mile,with the margin the proverbial "lizards lip".No sooner did one door shut and aother opened.Second prizemoney rocketed the "Black Superman" to the pinnacle of greatest stake winning pacer of all time.His 92 starts have resulted in 66 wins,14 seconds and 4 thirds for a mammoth $4,329,607.Not surprisingly,there seems to be a good deal of money left in "Blackie" as he heads for the Victoria Cup Carnival and his 6th Inter-Dominion campaign.Who knows what his final figures will be.
Spare a thought for Smoken Up who cracked it for his first Group One victory..The son of Tinted Cloud was having his 8th run at elite level,and came out of it with the Australasian mile record of 1-50.3 to his credit,as well as the big end of $500,000.Best known for his ability to race tough,Smoken Up has never been beaten more than 4 metres in G1 company,while giving the fans just what they want to see..
So much for the big bucks on the feature race stage.It is on the deeds of the Grand Circuit performers that our handful of promoters must sell our sport to potential owners, and the week in week out form lines of "bread and butter" racing,which are there to entice Joe Average-Punter to invest and re-invest and thus provide our prizemoney.A third group,the breeders,are out there trying to sell their product to the potential and established owners,who,well aware that even a self-supporting pacer or trotter is a difficult animal to come by,are paying less and less each year for non-black type juveniles.An internal war is raging in the light harness game between the forces of administration and the people who provide the show,the participants.Since privatisation of the TAB,successive administrations have taken more and more of the sport's distribution from Product Co to ensure the continued growth of the administrative pyramid to the detriment of prizemoney for the owners,who,incidentally, take all the financial risk.The career administrator takes no risks and his wages or salary package goes on "ad infinitum" with no "Key Performance Indicator" relating to a positive outcome for the sport he controls.If harness racing in Queensland is to regroup and go forward,it won't be with any strategic plan,it will be with more actual prizemoney,and not by the smoke and mirrors method of simply reducing the number of races run and coming up with a higher figure per unit for the remainder.