New look season adds interest to Harness Racing Awards

By Michael Guerin

Voters faced an unusual challenge deciding the winners for tomorrow’s Harness Horse of the Year awards in Christchurch.

The annual awards have finally bedded in in their new March home, having to be moved from the previous dates between August and as late as October because of the change of seasons.

That meant the 2022 season  finished on December 31 so the awards given out tomorrow night will cover that entire year, rather than the August to July 31 period the awards used to cover.

It tidies things up, no more need for a winner being called the 2022/23 winner, just the Horse of the Year for 2022.

But it does make for a closer study of the nominees for each category, especially around the absolute elite horses who dominate the big bang categories.

Effectively our season is now divided into two, meaning more good races can be held in warmer months whereas in the past the open class pacers, for example, really only raced from late September until around March.

That didn’t leave a lot of room for changes of the guard and often the New Zealand Cup winner was still the best pacer in the country at Auckland Cup time, which used to be late December at the latest early March.

Now the Auckland Cup (May) and before it the Hunter Cup and Miracle Mile are run in what feels like a different season, definitely different campaigns, than the New Zealand Cup in November. Add in The Race by Grins and our richest race is in April, our biggest race in November.

For decades the New Zealand Cup and the whole Cup week meeting has always had the biggest impact on Horse of the Year voters because it simply gets the most coverage and hype, it's the meeting most voters attend and quite rightly has the best races.

So when voters started combing over their selections for 2022’s Horses of the Year it was still fresh in their mind whereas the early season exploits of Self Assured (Race By Grins, Auckland Cup) felt a lot longer away, and to be honest still kinda felt like a different season.

How much weight those recent wins and carnivals holds over what was happening this time last year will be interesting on Saturday night.

There will be, as there always are in any racing code, be awards we all know the winners of, with horses like Millwood Nike for example impossible to vote against.

But the night will make for a lot of fun and the handing out of our ultimate award, with the very real question this season of whether it should be a pacer or a trotter?