On The Rails | Awesome 'foursome', including cup and mile, looks winning combination

Once again, a talking point of the QE II Cup-Champions Mile double for visitors was why the four Group races aren't staged on the same day to beef up one of the meetings into a second international fixture like the one in December.

Add upgraded versions of the Sprint Cup and a tweaked Queen Mother Memorial Cup and the day could offer the same recipe as December - quality races at 1,200m, 1,600m, 2,000m and 2,400m - and more than one visiting journalist posed the question, why not?

One reason the Champions Mile and QE II Cup were separated in 2012 was to accommodate a new sponsor (BMW) which wanted the branding on the Champions Mile programme to itself. This year there was no sponsor - though we are sure the carmaker would have been delighted to see the race still carried its name in a few places overseas - so the races could have been paired up again.

But the club has its reasons for not doing so, and for not rolling the four features into a "Turf World Championships Part II".

For one, it expects to find a new sponsor for the Champions Mile soon enough and then the branding wheel would go around again. For another, the situation of the Champions Mile a month before the Yasuda Kinen makes it ideal timing for horses going on to Japan.

Yes, the Sprint Cup could be upgraded from Group Two with a lick of paint and some dollars thrown at it and could, as Black Caviar's trainer Peter Moody mused last year, be turned into some kind of halfway assignment for Australian sprinters heading for Royal Ascot.

The upcoming KrisFlyer in Singapore has that potential, but is possibly a little too close to the Ascot meeting.