Racing: Graduates get $1m incentive

New Zealand's second million dollar galloping race was announced overnight.

What will be known as the Karaka Million will be for graduates of New Zealand Bloodstock's 2007 Karaka yearling sales.

It will be staged at Ellerslie in late January during the week leading up to that sale and will replace the $500,000 New Zealand Bloodstock Classique.

The Classique, similarly for Karaka graduates, has for the past six years been run at Te Rapa in early February.

The last running of the Classique will be at Te Rapa on February 3 next year for the graduates of the 2006 yearling sale.

The announcement is a triumph for the growing trend of racing club co-operation through a cluster system.

New Zealand Bloodstock has for some time been looking at ways of staging a million dollar graduates race before the sale rather than a race for half that value a week or two later.

The key was obtaining a suitable racing date that did not clash with the Wellington Cup at Trentham in late January.

NZ Bloodstock approached the Avondale Jockey Club, which has a suitable late January race permit, and told the AJC committee it wanted to stage the race at Ellerslie, asking if there was a way to solve the issue.

The AJC suggested the possibility of staging the $1 million 2-year-old race as a joint venture of the six racing clubs that form the northern-most cluster.

"We are delighted to announce that the Karaka Million will be jointly run by the Auckland Racing Club, Avondale Jockey Club, Counties Racing Club, Whangarei Racing Club, Dargaville Racing Club and Pakuranga Hunt Club," said NZB manager Petrea Vela.

Before the encouragement of the cluster system you could imagine such issues between jealous racing clubs taking a decade to resolve, if it was resolved.

New Zealand Thoroughbred Racing chairman Guy Sargent is due some credit here for pushing hard on the cluster issue.

Horlicks won the first million dollar race run in New Zealand at Ellerslie in the late 1980s.

Those races ceased and the magical mark was only reached again when the Hawkes Bay Jockey Club went to $1 million for the Kelt Capital Stakes in 2004.

If you need an example of what that means to New Zealand racing think of Starcraft.

The mercurial Australian galloper would not have been at Hastings but for the million dollars of the Kelt.

"It meant so much to Hawkes Bay Racing and gave our weight-for-age racing credibility," said Hawkes Bay Racing's manager John McGifford.

"Even to the point that betting turnover appeared to increase when we announced the million dollars stake.

"It was like people had a sense that something was going on."

There has been a smattering of Australian interest in horses coming back from across the Tasman for the Classique after being purchased at Karaka, but by Australian standards a million dollars has 10 times the lure of half that amount and the numbers of Australian-trained juveniles travelling the Tasman for the race should be significant.

"Everything gets a huge profile when you mention a million dollars," says McGifford. "It creates unprecedented interest."

Vela says the race is the end result of a lot of determination.

"For quite a while we've been looking at a way of packaging this race up with the sales series tighter than it was.

"We are excited that this will work as an incentive to come to Karaka in greater numbers."