Since their inauguration, Victoria’s incredibly innovative and wildly valuable Vicbred Platinum Home Grown Classic contests have sometimes struggled to fill their native brief.
Global pandemics, you see, have a nasty habit of creating chaos on myriad fronts; and the switch of seasons initiated by Harness Racing Australia during said pandemic also played its role.
Thankfully, however, after filling more positions than Adam Hunter during his West Coast career, these home grown features have finally settled where they’ve always belonged.
For those uninformed about what these contests are, or what the Vicbred scheme represents more broadly, here’s a brief synopsis.
In its most simplistic and fundamental form, the Vicbred program seeks to reward local breeders for plying their trade on Victorian soil.
There’s nothing new about such concepts of course; thoroughbred racing in Victoria has been operating its Super Vobis scheme for many years and virtually all jurisdictions promote similar state-based incentives.
Launching such initiatives, while organically admirable, isn’t all that tough.
The template is known, and processes established.
Properly leveraging them in the best interests of the industries they seek to serve, however; that’s a different story.
Right now, in collaboration with Harness Breeders Victoria, Harness Racing Victoria has established the most diverse, complex and creative futurity platform in the nation.
Indeed, many of the newest Vicbred initiatives available to owners and breeders are the first of their kind anywhere in the world.
Wonderful as these bonuses and benefits are, however, as one of the USA’s founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, once opined, ‘a place for everything, everything in its place’.
And the home grown classic finals are now in their place.
Plainly put, there were two potential purposes for these races when they were created.
Originally, in a world much different to the one we know today, despite its relative recency, the classics were slated as a last chance saloon for age-restricted horses bred in Victoria that either weren’t talented enough to tackle the Vicbred Super Series/Breeders Crown or simply were not ready.
And there’s little doubt that philosophy made perfect sense.
There is, however, another way of slicing this sumptuous little pie; and we’ll witness the benefits of this brand-new perspective at Melton Park Saturday night.
As has always been the case, horses tackling the home grown cannot have earned substantial prizemoney before entering the series as this platform was largely designed for young standardbreds just beneath the elite of their gender and generation.
Now, however, most of these classics are programmed much earlier than the Vicbred Super Series and the Breeders Crown.
There’s no golden bullet here.
Perhaps, in time, tonight’s combatants will sweep the home grown then dominate bolder, richer pastures later in the year.
Probably not, however.
These horses are at Melton tonight, because this is their grand final; a type of VFL granny if you will.
This was their intention, and this is where they’ll thrive.