One of the striking aspects about the Dubai World Cup Carnival is the sheer variety of nationalities that it continues to draw year after a year, be it owners, horses or trainers.
At this week’s sixth meeting, there will be horses trained in the UK, US, UAE, Turkey, Greece, Sweden, Norway, Ireland and Australia clashing across the six races. The quality of the racing in these jurisdictions varies hugely, however.
Australia, for example, has excellent prize money and some of the best racing in the world, while Greece is currently experiencing some tough times, so much so that their 10-time champion trainer, Christos Theodorakis, is forced to run his horses overseas.
He saddles Ahatis in the opening dirt handicap at Meydan on Friday. The winner of five of his six starts, the four-year-old nevertheless faces a difficult challenge.
“Ahatis is a good horse, but up until now he has been winning three-year-old only races,” said Theodorakis. “We know that racing here is of a much higher level (than Greece) but we’re here to fight and to try, and if we can place then that would be great.”
Simply by being in Dubai, the trainer is shining the spotlight on racing in his home country, which is never a bad thing.
“We have great facilities in Greece and the weather is perfect for racing all year round, but the state hasn’t invested in the track, which is a shame,” he said.
Coming from a much more buoyant racing nation is Adelaide-based trainer Will Clarken, who will send out He’s A Balter and Parsifal in the G2 Blue Point Sprint, race four.
“This is a big target race for both of them,” said the Group 1-winning handler. “It’s very hard to try and decide between them.”
Despite plenty of success during only five years of “taking training seriously,” Clarken says that traveling horses overseas is something he has always wanted to do.
“We’ve traveled horses extensively around Australia with mixed success,” he said. “These two horses are perfect for this as they’re older horses who often get weighted out of races at home and they’re not quite good enough for the Melbourne sprints.
“This trip has been quite an eye-opener and maybe in the future we’d look to use it to bring horses here from Europe and then take them on to Australia.”
So now he has the taste for travel, how about a trip to racing’s annual garden party, Royal Ascot?
“If I had one good enough then I’d be there in a heartbeat,” he said.
Maybe one day the Greeks will make it too.