Other wonderful races, such as the Inter Dominions and Miracle Miles, are special, but the Cup is the one unmovable monument of harness racing, the race that hasn’t changed because it hasn’t needed to.
Leap To Fame’s trainer-driver Grant Dixon, who trains the champion stallion with wife Trista, knows that.
“This is the race you grow up watching and this is the one we wanted to win,” Dixon said.
But there is winning and then there is what Leap To Fame did in this New Zealand Cup.
He lost the battle for the early lead to older half-brother Swayzee and Dixon moved straight to the parked position, knowing he was going to spend three minutes covering more ground than the two-time NZ Cup winner inside him and with New Zealand’s fastest horse Marketplace sitting on his back.
The 7-year-old stallion was now the hunter and the hunted, so Dixon reached for the most damaging weapon he could find: Leap To Fame’s heart.
He started to work over Swayzee down the back straight and had him off the bit through relentless pressure, bullying the bully.
At the top of the Addington straight, Leap To Fame had Swayzee beaten but the pack smelt blood, knowing the champ had to be vulnerable.
First, Tact McLeod launched to his inside, threatening the greatest upset in NZ Cup history. More worryingly, Marketplace, pacing’s young lion, was sitting on his back and ready to attack the king and take his place at the head of the pride.
Marketplace wobbled this way and that and then flew at Leap To Fame but, in a career approaching 100 starts, few horses have run past the champ and Marketplace became the latest to come up short.
It is the fourth straight year an Australian has won the NZ Cup, yet you won’t hear one person who loves harness racing, a great horse or any form of special athlete complain. Kiwi or not.
Because Leap To Fame isn’t a Queenslander or an Aussie or even just a racehorse anymore.
He is now woven into the DNA of any true racing fan who has seen him and especially those lucky enough to witness him shine through this rare Addington Cup Day gloom.
He has entered the realm of the champions people talk about when they discuss their greatest.
For some he will be the greatest, their version of what other people saw in Frankel, Secretariat, Winx or New Zealand’s incomparable pacing legend Cardigan Bay.
But Leap To Fame is, of course, not finished. He will be spreading his spell of joy and awe for maybe another nine months and could even be back at Addington on Friday.
But what happens now, next month or in his finale at his hometown Inter Dominions next July matters little, if at all.
Leap To Fame has already won everything that matters and now he has won the one that really matters.
And he won it like only he could. The horse who wouldn’t take no for an answer. The pacing hero who went where others can’t go and emerged as happy as Larry.
Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald’s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world’s biggest horse racing carnivals.