THE SUNSHINE COAST NEWSPAPER COLUMN - THE BATTLE HAS BEEN JOINED. WELCOME TO THE WINTER CARNIVAL

By Graham Potter | Sunday, May 8, 2016

Graham Potter writes a weekly column for the Sunshine Coast daily. Due to demand from those having trouble accessing the paper these columns are now also published on HRO courtesy of the Sunshine Coast daily.

The first assault team has already had its say and the follow up attack line will soon sweep right across South East Queensland in a powerful surge looking to brush aside all local resistance.

Welcome to the Queensland Winter Racing Carnival and the annual ‘southern invasion’ of the state by some of the top race horse trainers from New South Wales, Victoria and New Zealand.

The elite ‘Triple W Strike Division’ of Waller, Waterhouse and Weir is a formidable force in itself but when you consider that their presence in the battle is flanked by names such as Baker, Freedman, Hawkes, Hickmott, Maher, Pike, Snowden, O’Shea and Smerdon, to name a few, there can be no doubting they have the firepower to carry all before them.

There will always be small pockets of counter resistance and a local trainer or two might deservedly snare a big race, but the southern juggernaut will be incredibly hard to peg back, not just because of their expertise and the quality of runner that they bring to the contest, but because of the overwhelming numbers they put into play.

Take yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Cup meeting at the Gold Coast for example. In the feature event, the Group 2 Hollindale Stakes fourteen horses made up the final field. No less than eleven of these horses were runners trained outside of Queensland.

Maybe the extremely high percentage of visiting runners in that example will not be true for all of the carnivals main features?

Maybe, but you wouldn’t hold your breath looking at the nominations for the Group 1 races that will take place in Queensland in the coming weeks.

Eighteen out of nineteen nominations for next week’s BTC Cup are from visiting stables. The same applies for twenty-nine of the forty nominations for the Doomben Cup, forty-eight out of the fifty-four nominations for the Doomben 10 000 ... and so it goes on.

Of course all of this doesn’t mean that the likes of local heavyweights Tony Gollan, Robert Heathcote and others capable of rising to the occasion will not have their say.

What it does show though is exactly what the local trainers are up against.

For most it will be a rear-guard action.

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Based on the above evidence there is little doubt about the direction the carnival prize for the UBET Super Six Trainers’ Challenge will head.

Who is going to be carrying it home is the question.

And what a prize it is.

The winning trainer can choose between a $140,000 BMW X6 or a VIP trip to the Kentucky Derby for seven people.

To get to that point he or she has to accumulate the most points over a six week period from May 14 to June 25 with points being accrued by horses finishing in the placings over all of the Black Type events contested during this time at the carnival.

The Challenge is designed to be the battle of the big guns. In a way that is unfortunate, but it should be no less interesting for all that.

I wonder which one of those Southerners want it the most!

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