HISTORY is littered with hugely hyped athletes who never truly translate potential into performance. 

In tennis there’s Bernard Tomic and – to some extent Nick Kyrgios – in cricket there’s Shane Watson and in AFL there are myriad including Danyle Pearce and Sean Rusling among many, many others.

WHETHER you solemnly support or definitively deride the long-term lockdowns, which, for whatever reasons, affected Australasia more than anywhere else, we can all agree on this. 

We have all, harness fans in particular, desperately missed the trans-Tasman rivalries that have historically defined the sport. 

Wonderful as their achievements have been, Bill and Anne Anderson’s Lauriston Bloodstock are currently racing in rarefied air. 

Despite repeated messaging that Lauriston’s best horse, Ladies In Red, will not target Grand Circuit events in coming months, most pacing zealots would rate her as Victoria’s pre-eminent pacer. 

On Saturday night at Menangle, the fog was so thick, it almost obscured one of the greatest milestones recorded in Australasian harness history.

Honesty, as Billy Joel once warbled, is very hard to find; particularly in racing of all three codes.

Champion sportspeople – and also those striving for greatness – must possess a quartet of critical qualities in their quest to elevate clear of competitors and contemporaries.

Human beings, at least those that find inspiration and solace from sporting excellence, naturally tend to place extraordinary expectations upon champions of any athletic pursuit.

When seriously major races loom large on the horizon, punters typically target their focus on one, or perhaps two, lead-up contests in their bid to highlight future feature winners.

FOREVER and a day, punting, understandably enough, has been based on finding winners. 

These days, however, finding losers can be equally profitable – particularly when it comes to the sport of harness racing. 

Transformational South African leader Nelson Mandela once stated – without realising he was mentoring punters worldwide – that, “I never lose; I either win or I learn”.

The ideal scenario, as most experienced players will attest, is winning and learning at once. 

Occasionally we get a “hamburger with the lot”, sometimes we win or learn in exclusion and mostly, despite our best intentions, we do neither.

Tonight, in the first metropolitan meeting staged at Tabcorp Park for seven weeks, the Our Maestro Free For All offers smart investors the chance to both profit and prepare.

Choose your favourite sport, whatever that may be, and imagine the team or player you most admire could qualify for a crack at that code’s most prestigious prize with one, solitary success.

From a purely cultural perspective, the chasm between regional and urban Australia has never been greater.

Despite its obvious drawbacks, it remains patently clear that Victoria’s pandemic-enforced periods of regional racing widened our eyes to myriad lessons and learnings.

Some may still resist the notion but based on Saturday night’s action at Melton, Australia’s foreboding, if far from meek, four-year-old stars are set to inherit the Earth.

Originally, the focus of our investigation relating to young guns tackling older, more seasoned rivals, was the weekend’s fast class pace featuring Better Eclipse, Rock N Roll Doo and Spring In His Step.

And we’ll get back to that very soon indeed.

We've all tried calculating dog years into human years – mostly inaccurately – but how does this translation apply to harness racing. 

In cold, heard term, you can’t; but let’s try regardless. 

A steady rule of thumb is that standardbreds starts their racing careers at two, which roughly represents 14 human years, and that we add three human years for every standardbred year going forward. 

If we apply this system in its rawest form, three-year-olds are much like 17-year-old athletes, four-year-old’s 20 and on we go from there. 

Traditionally, particularly through harness racing’s halcyon days, standardbred athletes matured later than most.

Saturday night at Tabcorp Park Melton was freezing cold and eerily quiet with a wind factor falling slightly short of cyclone status and intermittent passages of precipitation.

These were not fertile conditions for freakish performances.

This was also not the time of year you’d expect to have your mind blown.

ON Wednesday night Billy Slater’s Maroons delivered a trend-defying success over New South Wales 16-10. 

This was a result that mattered; but only in Australia – perhaps New Zealand – and only to the folks the live and breathe for rugby league. 

IN sport and racing, some wins simply mean more than others. 

Often, victories are elevated in esteem through prizemoney or prestige, sometimes the pleasure of success is sweetened by the presence of friendship or, alternatively, vengeance.