By Len Johnson

Australia has two great handicap races _ the Melbourne Cup and the Stawell Gift _ and inarguably it is easier for a good horse to win the former than for a good sprinter to win the latter.

The Stawell Easter Gift of 2010 will be remembered for the embarrassing fiasco over the length of the track which turned it into the Stawell Easter Glitch. Rightly so: how on earth could a track that is laid down for one event only _ and therefore requires measuring each year _ be over three metres long? Surely all that is required is to check the length, re-check it and call a third bloke in to confirm the measurement.

There was also the little matter of the $5000 withheld from the prize-money of winner, Tom Burbidge, for his puzzlingly inconsistent form. The weekend before he won the nation’s richest handicap sprint, he could not make the final of a Melbourne suburban gift.

Puzzling indeed _ and the explanation does not wash. Many of us are painfully aware about the deleterious impact a dodgy back can have on performance, but if Burbidge’s back was so bad the week before Stawell, why even run at all. The most charitable explanation may be that he needed a fitness test, but did not want to reveal his true form.

In any case, the $5000 fine was effectively nothing more than a slap on the wrist. (The fine was reported to be the largest in Gift history, though who would trust a Stawell ‘stat’ this week?) Surely, if the practice is really frowned on, Burbidge should have been relieved of at least half his winnings. The IAAF used to ensure athletes turned up to run its now-defunct Grand Prix final by docking half their series earnings if they did not.

Anyway, as amazing and amusing as the fiasco around the length of the track and the lengths the winner went to in concealing his form were, they overshadowed a longer-term problem for Stawell. Once again, the race went to an outmarker who, on the big weekend, ran metres faster than his handicap suggested. Once again the outcome of the final was obvious after Saturday’s heats.

Indeed, the 3.2 metres by which the famous uphill grass track was over the 120 metres distance, was comparable to the distance by which most winners in the past 20 years have beaten the handicapper. Why worry about the one and do absolutely nothing about the other?

That’s why I used the Melbourne Cup comparison. In the past 20 years, the Cup has adopted a quality handicap weighting system by which superior horses are given less severe weight penalties than pure handicap rules would suggest.

The difference has been obvious. Since 1990, the race that stops a nation has been won by some quality horses _ Doriemus, Saintly, Might and Power, Media Puzzle, Makybe Diva, Delta Blues and Viewed among them _ horses that were capable of winning at set weights and weight-for-age, not just under pure handicap conditions.

In the same period, the Gift has been won by just three athletes _ Dean Capobianco, Jason Hunte and Joshua Ross _ who were quality sprinters at the time they won. (Steve Brimacombe, who won in 1991, went on to become one.)

Looking at weights and handicaps, no fewer than seven horses have won the Cup in that period carrying 55.5kgs or more (the sort of weight a quality horse gets). Another three lugged 54.5 around the 3200m distance and three more carried 53.

If we assess a ‘quality’ gift handicap at five metres, only Capobianco (2.25), Hunte (4.25) and Ross (who was on scratch when he won for the second time in 2005) have won the Gift off a quality mark in the same time. Three more _ Nathan Allen (5.25), and Steve Hutton and Sam Jamieson (both off 6) have won off six metres or less. Thirteen of the 21 winners, including Burbidge at 8.75, have started off marks between 7 and 10 metres.

Just as bad, many of these have been the obvious winner from the heats, the only query being whether they can withstand the pressure of favouritism. Too many races won too easily does not make for the sort of suspense a handicap race is designed to produce.

It also makes the lot of the good runners even harder. It is difficult enough to stand up big starts when everyone is running true to form, near impossible when some have disguised their form by anywhere between one and three metres. The star runners who generate the pre-event publicity are no good thing even to make Monday’s semi-finals, much less the final.

Stawell is a great carnival and great fun _ and many of its devotees demand nothing more than that. But as a quality athletic event it has more credibility problems than a long track. It’s easy to get a more accurate surveyor, harder to change long-held attitudes.