On The Bubbles will start as one of the favourites for this weekend's $260,000 Wellington Seamarket Levin Classic this weekend.
On The Bubbles will start as one of the favourites for this weekend's $260,000 Wellington Seamarket Levin Classic this weekend.
A strong field for tomorrow's $260,000 Wellington Seamarket Levin Classic at Trentham has justified moving the race from January to March.
That's the view of Levin Racing Club president Bruce McCarrison, who said the survival of the club's flagship event as a Group One race hinged on attracting a top field of 3-year-old milers.
The Levin Classic was under warning of a downgrade in status by the code's Graded Stakes Committee, which annually reviewed feature races to ensure they were worthy of their black type status in sales catalogues and inline with international standards.
Time-honoured races like the Auckland and Wellington Cups had received downgrades in recent years.
McCarrison said the new mid-March date for the Levin Classic - formerly the Levin Bayer Classic - now felt like the perfect fit in the racing calendar and avoided a clash with the Karaka Million race at Ellerslie in late January.
"It's important for the club and for New Zealand breeders that the Levin Classic retains its Group One status," he said.
The move had already been justified by a marked increase in the number of initial nominations for the race - 136 - and the club had used the extra revenue from nomination fees to increase the stake of the race from $220,000 to $260,000.
The Levin Classic was first run at Levin in 1981, in what was a bold move by the LRC committee of the time, in introducing a new 3-year-old 1600m race hot on the heels of the 1000 and 2000 Guineas held at Riccarton in early November for the same age group.
It was not without controversy, but when the club guaranteed a stake of $100,000 - more than double the stake of the Riccarton features and the third richest race in the country at the time - it duly attracted the very best colts and fillies.
The following year it was awarded Group One status.
McCarrison said he couldn't put his finger on what made the early days of the Classic so magical, where the midweek race attracted more than 10,000 people oncourse, and with turnover bettered only by the Auckland Cup meeting that was held in January at the time.
He said the town just fell in love with racing for a day, akin to Melbourne Cup fever. He remembered shop windows being dressed up and people going to work dressed as jockeys.
But a series of bad decisions almost killed a goose laying golden eggs.
A move to Ōtaki in 1991, when the LRC and the Ōtaki-Māori Racing Club formed a consortium to develop the former as a top level training hub and the latter as the racing venue, saw the Classic lose some of its lustre.
Despite being run and won by some champion horses, it lost some of that original mystique.
"It wasn't the best move," McCarrison said.
In 2014, another move saw the Classic change its traditional November date to January, and move tracks from Ōtaki to Trentham, again in response to the threat of a status downgrade from NZTR.
Former Levin jockey Johnathan Parkes and On The Bubbles winning the Manawatu Sires Produce at Awapuni last season. They pair again in the $260,000 Wellington Seamarket Levin Classic this weekend.
Meanwhile, early favouritism for tomorrow's Classic was with the proven Group performers Imperatriz and On The Bubbles, while it also featured a host of potential topliners like Shamus, I Wish I Win, Cacofonix, Zeitaku and Miss Ella.
