By Michael Guerin
If you hang around race tracks long enough you will hear a lot of complaints.
Some are warranted (horse drugging, poor administration, bad catering), some are pointless (shocking riding and driving displays by people you were dumb enough to invest on) and some are just plain boorish.
Complaints about the Interdominion Pacing Grand Final being a mobile 3200m fall into the latter category.
Anybody who is still complaining about the Grand Final being a 3200m mobile should stop wasting perfectly good oxygen that could go to somebody who really needs it.
With just over a fortnight before racing's greatest series returns to Auckland the moaners are flexing their tongues.
Auckland is about to host a $400,000 race with at least 12 visiting Australian pacers aiming at it, a horse called Christian Cullen who can do anything but play the piano, and some of the best trainers and drivers in the world ready to go to work.
Yet a small core of harness racing morons are loading the gun to shoot the industry in the foot again.
Fair enough that people were shocked when the Auckland Trotting Club announced a 3200m mobile pacing Grand Final last year. Those who thought it was too tough could pull out.
Some did. Barry Purdon would love to win the Interdominion Grand Final on his home track with Holmes D G but 3200m mobile isn't the 4-year-old's go at the moment so out he came.
It was time to go hard or go home and he chose to go home. No moaning or complaining, just a simple, smart business decision.
Yet last weekend, like so many before it, we had some of the people behind leading Interdom contenders complaining about the 3200m mobile.
I have heard these complaints on both sides of the Tasman, from owners and trainers. Usually from people who have not had to worry about the mortgage payments for sometime. Makes you wonder if when you get to be rich you start making up things to be worried about.
Fact time. Nobody is being forced to start their horsey in the Interdoms. If the connections of horses not suited to a 3200m mobile can find another $400,000 pacing race that night I am sure the ATC would understand.
A 3200m mobile is a big scary monster. It will not make your horse happy, he will be tired and want to sleep for the whole next day.
Well, boohoo. Horses are bred and trained all their lives to race. That is their job and sometimes your job makes you tired.
Of the six biggest pacing races in Australasia, three - the New Zealand, Auckland and Hunter Cups - are 3200m or further.
Now so is a fourth.
The best horses are aimed first at the New Zealand Cup, the Auckland Cup and then the Melbourne carnival, ending in the Hunter Cup.
For our standardbreds, 3200m wars are a way of life. They are the battlefields on which harness racing medals are earned.
So the mobile start will add another 400m to a hard 3200m at the end of a hard two weeks of racing. This will not kill them.
The news flash here is that all 13 starters will be running the same distance.
They all would have had three runs the week beforehand. Their trainers have all known for a year that this would be the case.
Four minutes after the Interdom Grand Final starts one horse will be the champ.
He, or she, will rule thanks to connections who walked the tightrope between being too hard and too soft.
Connections who got on with the job instead of boorishly moaning about something which wasn't going to change.
Horse Racing: Grand Final moaners find no sympathy
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