The Guineas tradition

The Australian Guineas with its four decades is a relative newcomer to the list of ‘Guineas’ races around the world. The race name, ‘Guineas’, signifies something special in terms of tradition and quality. Why is this so?   

Racing preserves words and expressions that have outlived their origins. We have ‘dead-heats’ and ‘photo finishes’ and ‘stakes races’, but the definitions have changed. Australian racing weights and distances have been metric since 1973, but the ‘mile’, as in ‘All-Stars Mile’ and the ‘Champions Mile’, has not deserted us. Even the old ‘furlong’ (220 yards or 201 metres) will still be invoked on an Australian racecourse.  

It is the same with the guinea, which belongs to currency. Australia went decimal in February 1966: ‘In come the dollars and in come the cents’, Dollar Bill sang, ‘To replace the pounds and the shillings and the pence’. There never was an Australian guinea note or coin, but the traditional value of one guinea from colonial times was one pound, one shilling. This was five per cent more than the pound. In 1966 it converted to $2.10. Like many commodities, thoroughbreds were bought and sold at auctions in guineas, not pounds. That extra shilling was often the auctioneer’s percentage.  

One guinea went a long way in an era where a one pound coin was a ‘sovereign’. Stake money was often advertised in sovereigns. Imagine how rich a prize was England’s Two Thousand Guineas when it was first run in 1809, for three-year-olds at set weights over a mile, at Newmarket. While the Epsom Derby was older by three decades, the Guineas has the longest standing record for a race being run every year, without fail, on the same track over the same distance. Its winners include many of the greatest names in turf history.    

Although England’s Two Thousand Guineas is technically open to fillies, only seven in its 216 year history have won. In 1814 a complementary Thousand Guineas Stakes was inaugurated at Newmarket exclusively for fillies, and it too has enjoyed an impressive, continuous history.   

In Australia, The Victoria Racing Club was formed in 1864 after the collapse of two rival organisations, the local Jockey Club and the Turf Club. Both had raced at Flemington. The Victoria Jockey Club advertised its own expensive ‘Two Thousand Guineas’ here for the spring of 1861, but under vastly different rules from the English pattern. It was for three-year-olds and over, ‘open to all the world’, weight-for-age, distance 2¼ miles.  

The stake money reached 1800 sovereigns, but the final field fell away to nine local runners. Mormon, ridden by Joe Morrison, won easily. As a spectacle and betting medium it was immediately eclipsed by the Turf Club’s brand-new two-mile handicap race, three weeks later, though its prize money was half as much. A larger crowd turned out that day. New South Wales’ rising hero, Archer, easily defeated Mormon The next year the Jockey Club abandoned its Guineas, while the Turf Club’s Melbourne Cup went on to become an institution under the VRC.  

Sticking closer to the English classics, a number of prestigious Guineas races strictly for three-year-olds emerged in various Australian cities, beginning with the Caulfield Guineas in 1881, followed by the Queensland Guineas in 1896 and the Rosehill Guineas in 1910. Then came the Port Adelaide Guineas, the Canterbury Guineas (now the Randwick Guineas), the Western Australian Guineas, the Sandown Guineas—first held at Caulfield years before Sandown Park opened—and even a Darwin Guineas. In 1946 Caulfield inaugurated its own Thousand Guineas just for fillies.  

There was definitely an opening for an Australian Guineas, and this became the autumn classic inaugurated by the VRC in 1986. Flemington could not have hoped for a better result, with the first five editions won by classy colts who went on to great stud careers—True Version, Military Plume, Flotilla, King’s High, and then the incomparable Zabeel. His sons Mouawad, Dignity Dancer and Reset are also on the winners’ list, along with other outstanding sires such as Flying Spur, Kenny’s Best Pal and Pins. So too are those popular geldings Mahogany, Apache Cat and Alligator Blood.    

Fillies have won the Australian Guineas six times. In 2022 the brilliant New Zealand Thousand Guineas winner Legarto added the Australian Guineas to her record. She joined Mystic Journey, Mosheen, Shamrocker, Miss Finland and Triscay on that list. Great company.  

The prize pool for the 2025 Group 1 Howden Australian Guineas is $1 million. That’s a lot of guineas: 476,190 of them, by my calculation.