Horse racing: Kiwi trainer Mark Jones eyes glory with Tact McLeod at Inter Dominion

Tact McLeod winning at Addington. Photo / Race Images

The Inter Dominion used to be harness racing’s most glamorous event but it has now become a very cunning afterthought for Kiwi trainer Mark Jones.

The series starts at Newcastle in New South Wales this Friday before moving around the state and culminating in two finals at Menangle outside Sydney on December 14.

The Pacing Final is worth A$500,000 and the Trotting Final is A$150,000, which is one of the reasons many of the best horses in Australasia are not taking part.

The Inter Dominion used to sit alongside the New Zealand Cup, Miracle Mile and a few other features that have had their own highs and lows as the biggest event in transtasman harness racing.

But with this being the last year of stake levels that are no longer considered elite, the quality of the series has suffered.

It isn’t all because of the stakes though.

Defending pacing champion Leap To Fame was originally heading to the series, as he was the New Zealand Cup, before he got ill.

Two-time NZ Cup winner Swayzee is chasing an A$1 million Country Cups bonus in NSW instead while New Zealand’s best pacers, Merlin and Don’t Stop Dreaming, can race for $500,000 in New Zealand next month without having to cross the Tasman or tackle the Inter Dominion’s three races in eight days qualifying schedule.

In the trotting ranks the issues are the same, with the final only A$150,000 and requiring three races in eight days to qualify, which is one reason two-time champ Just Believe won’t be there.

His trainers have decided to race at Auckland next month for more or less the same money without having to transport him back to Australia after his successful New Zealand Cup week campaign.

The same applies to Oscar Bonavena and Muscle Mountain, so both the pacing and trotting Inter Dominion have become series shorn of most of the best top 10 horses, but that has a bonus of sorts.

If Leap To Fame or Just Believe were in their respective series they would only have to race up to their best to win and would start maybe $1.20 in their finals. Now the championless series is like racing like, so while it won’t be crowning a new transtasman King or Queen, it should at least provide for some even betting contests.

And it gives New Zealand the most unlikely shot at Inter Dominion glory with former Southland pacer Tact McLeod, who arrived in Sydney yesterday a virtual unknown.

He was the same here until a few months ago and the big, raw-boned pacer only really suggested he was a genuine open-class horse when he won the Canterbury Classic six starts ago.

He followed that up with useful and unlucky midfield finishes in the New Zealand Cup and NZ Free-For-All at Addington during Cup week while Jones was his caretaker trainer.

Jones saw the Inter Dominion pacing series fall away, rang cousin Anthony Butt for a second opinion and the pair hatched the plan to put in a late nomination for Tact McLeod.

Now a horse who would have been 200-1 to win the series three months ago, when still trained in Southland by co-owner Trevor Proctor, is the $4 TAB favourite to win it.

“He has picked the right series to try it,” says Butt, the former Canterbury horseman who will drive Tact McLeod in the series.

“It has obviously dropped away a lot and with the stake levels and the travel around the state this year, you can kind of understand why.

“But it is still a special series because of its historical significance and he could be the sort of horse who handles it and be in with a chance.”

The series starts with 2030m heats at Newcastle on Friday, followed by 1730m heats at Bathurst next Wednesday week and then the last round of heats and the finals over 2300m at Menangle on December 7 and 14.

Help is on the way for the beleaguered series as it will move to Queensland next year for at least the next three years and be held in July with the pacing final to be worth A$1m, bringing it into line with harness racing’s other major pacing races.

Harness Racing New Zealand is moving to standardised acceptance times for all fields starting next month.

Harness racing has suffered from frequent delayed release of fields as meetings are often left open overnight to give trainers more time to decide whether to nominate in the hope of securing bigger fields.

That will stop next week, with HRNZ to close entries for both Thursday and more importantly Friday meetings at noon on Monday, with acceptances at 2pm the same day.

HRNZ will also halt the outdated process of naming last-start drivers in the fields when no driver is immediately declared, both moves being wins for fixed odds punters and bookmakers seeking clarity around markets.

Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald’s racing editor in 1995 and covers the world’s biggest horse racing carnivals.