West BredBreeding

silky

Just writing down some of my thoughts so feel free to correct me if i'm going down the wrong path here but after listening to Paul Jordan comment on radio recently about how great the westspeed system is and how good it was that his young horses are running around each Saturday for $70k got me thinking? Am i in the minority or could/should this money be distributed amongst a bigger group of horses/owners rather than just early running Saturday class horses? Instead of pushing the youngsters early for a quick buck, don't we need to be spreading the prizemoney/bonuses as wide as we can so we can make ownership as affordable as possible and intern get a flow on effect into other areas of the industry, which is one of the things we need to do so we can start the long road back to becoming sustainable and relevant.

I will probably get shot down for this but why don't we have something like a 1 tier bonus system of approx $1.5k/$4.5k(breeder/owner) bonus system for all eligible horses between 2 and 5yo(if the figures add up) for all races over the calendar year? Something like this would give many more horse owners the chance to get his/her share of the pie without having to push your horse's to hard to early.

Another condition of Westspeed which could also to be looked at is WA mares being covered by eastern states stallions and still being eligible for Westspeed bonus'. I can see that the bigger WA studs send there top mares east to get better results at the yearling sales but as long as these horse's and others bred over east(Bob Peter's) are eligible for Westspeed the local breeding industry will struggle to attract the best stallions possible to WA. I understand there are bigger issues involved in getting quality stallions to WA, including the dropping broodmare numbers etc but given the current state of the industry I think making WA mares covered by eastern states mares ineligible for westspeed could be a good stepping stone in rebuilding our stallion ranks(Blackfriars, Awesome Rock, Snippetson, Demerit, War Chant, Oratorio and others is a good starting point) to accomodate quality mares.

Cheers
 

DamienWyer

For this to happen, there would have to be a long lead time, at least four years.