The Clash of the Titans : One Way Traffic

The outstanding effort of the opening day saw the Aussies do to the European sprinters what their cricketers have been doing to England for years. Miss Andretti (by Ihtiram), from Western Australia, led home a 1, 3, 4 for Australia in the King’s Stand Stakes (Gr.2), taking a big slice off the track record.

Miss Andretti (TDN/Getty Images)This result only serves to vindicate our long-held view that the European sprinters are no longer the force they used to be. The best of them are merely the fastest runners in a group bred to go further, with the emphasis on out-and-out speed in European breeding having been lost to the vicissitudes of the commercial marketplace, and the skewed prize money allocations for races beyond a mile. The only thing missing from this spectacle was S.A’s own Mythical Flight. Whatever the Aussies dominance today, they’d have know they’d been in a scrap had he been there.