Should the Derby be shortened?

Two issues are dominating racing in the lead-up to the start of the famous Flemington carnival on Saturday.

One is over the distance of the VRC Derby and the other is over the way the track should be prepared given the forecast of warm weather and no rain throughout Melbourne Cup week.

On the first issue most trainers are calling for the Derby to be shortened from 2500 metres to 2000 metres while on the other the call has been for water and more water to be poured onto Flemington to ensure the feature races are not run on rock hard tracks - even if it means beginning meetings on a track bordering on slow.

But while the leading players in racing may have point on the first issue, they are way off base on the second one.

First to the Derby - Victoria's oldest race - which was first run in 1855, some six years before the first Melbourne Cup.

Traditionalists will say the race, which has been run over 2500 metres since 1973 and before that was run over 12 furlongs (approximately 2400 metres), has to remain at its current distance.

The spectacle of the Derby and the VRC Oaks beginning right in front of the huge crowds, around only 150 metres from the winning post, is one of the great sights in Australian racing and is the ultimate test of endurance for three-year-olds in the spring.

But that is the problem, increasingly it appears too much of a test and the race is suffering in prestige as a result.

Surely the aim of any feature race is to get the best field possible but that simply won't happen in this year's Derby - which is likely to be overshadowed by the other three Group One races on Saturday in terms of the quality of the respective fields.

Consider the best three-year-olds so far this season.

The best of all in Bart Cummings' exciting Cox Plate winner So You Think won't be running the Derby on Saturday because Cummings is adamant the distance is too far for immature spring three-year-olds and should revert to 2000 metres.

So You Think will instead be saved for the feature race of the final day of the Flemington carnival - the Group One Emirates Stakes (over 1600 metres) - even though he will again have to compete against the older horses in that race rather than just against his own three-year-old age group in the Derby.

Cox Plate runner-up Manhattan Rain also won't be there as Gai Waterhouse has decided to spell her regally bred colt rather than risk damaging him by running in the Derby while Peter Moody has also decided not to risk his promising young giant Hanks - the impressive winner of last week's key Derby lead-up race the AAMI Vase over 2040 metres at Moonee Valley.

And Spacecraft, the runner-up in that same race, is also likely to be saved instead for an 1800 metre race on Oaks Day.

So arguably the four best three-year-olds this season won't be running in the spring feature race for three-year-olds.

While this will probably make no difference to the drunken hordes that will descend on Flemington - most of whom probably wouldn't even know what distance the Derby is run over anyway - it should be an issue the VRC takes very seriously.

Already the Caulfield Guineas (over 1600 metres) has overtaken the Derby as the most important spring three-year-old race within the racing industry and certainly in terms of breeding prospects with that race ranking alongside the Golden Slipper in Sydney as the most important races to win in terms of building a profile for a future stallion.

In contrast the Derby has no importance, as evidenced by the fact that of the top 50 stallions so far this season - in terms of producing winners - only one in Blevic (1994) has won the VRC Derby.

Indeed the Derby in recent years has become a race won by horses that are rarely heard of again - the notable exceptions being 2003 winner Elvstroem, which went on to win a Caulfield Cup and 2006 winner Efficient, which then won the 2007 Melbourne Cup and is equal favourite for this year's Cup.

But other recent winners such as Plastered, Kibbutz, Helenus, Benicio, Amalfi and Hit The Roof were never the same again while last year's winner Rebel Raider is currently battling injury - a curse that seems to strike more VRC Derby winners than not the following year.

Surely reducing the race to 2000 metres would ensure a better quality field without damaging the tradition of the race and could ensure the race becomes a more enticing prospect as far as breeding prospects are concerned.

But while the push for the Derby distance to be shortened grows in credibility by the year, the perennial watering debate is merely tiresome.

Trainers calling for heavily watered tracks seem to forget that Australia is one of the driest continents on earth and that Melbourne is in the grip of what these days seems to be a permanent drought.

No-one wants to see horses breaking down but Racing Victoria's current policy of tracks beginning the day as a Dead Four and then being upgraded to Good during the meeting (when warm conditions prevail as was the case in last week's Cox Plate and is expected to be the same on Derby and Cup days) is fair and reasonable.

Why should trainers and owners of horses in earlier races have to plough through heavily watered tracks that are the worse side of dead in races worth considerable amounts of money just so tracks can still have some give in them for the feature races later in the day?

Already Lee Freedman has complained that his European import Speed Gifted - which won the Metropolitan on a bog track in Sydney - had his spring campaign wrecked by a firm track on Cox Plate day with the horse now having been scratched from the Melbourne Cup.

As Freedman pointed out older European horses just don't handle Australian conditions but perhaps they are the wrong horses to be setting for the Melbourne Cup anyway.

After all the likelihood of Flemington at Melbourne Cup time offering up the same conditions as England and France is always unlikely given Melbourne's increasingly dry weather.

The European trainers can whinge as much as they like - indeed Dermott Weld refused to even bring his best hope in Profound Beauty over for this year's Cup for fear of injury on a firm track - but there is no way countries like England and France would cater their racetracks on big days to Australian runners demanding hard and fast conditions.

Rather it's about finding the right horse for the right conditions and it's funny how Bart Cummings' horses always seem to be able to handle any track conditions in any of our big races come spring time.

Maybe that is because he spends all his time toughening his horses up rather than wasting time arguing for conditions to be tailored to suit his horses.