Gelding proportion as a marker of prestige in Dubai: middle-distance, synthetic the valued entities

I noticed something else about the horses in the Al Quoz Sprint: all 11 were geldings! This seemed so strange to me that I even checked the conditions, to make sure being a gelding wasn't a requirement (it would be a strange condition of the race, because the winner, Ortensia, was a mare). It turned out that the proportion of geldings differed greatly by race: 1 of 12 males was a gelding in the Godolphin Mile; 3 of 13 in the Gold Cup; 1 of 12 in the UAE Derby; 6 of 12 in the Golden Shaheen; 6 of 15 in the Duty Free; 4 of 9 in the Sheema Classic; and 2 of 13 in the World Cup.

Are we to take from this that, despite the (by way of comparison to the other races) lowly $1,000,000 purse, the Mile is in a way the most prestigious race, with horses groomed for success early in their careers? A mile is certainly a prestigious distance, probably even more so outside the U.S. than in the U.S. Then there is a certain commonality in the Golden Shaheen having the second highest proportion of geldings after the Al Quoz Sprint, since it is another sprint. If we again take the proportion of geldings to indicate prestige, it seems odd that sprinting would be taken with so little seriousness, but mile races so glamorized. Both require speed, and my informal review of ex-sprinter stallions is that they do very well in this day and age.

There also seems a trend of the races on the synthetic having fewer geldings than the races on turf (21% to 49%; the gelding percentage in the turf races was 33% even without the gelding-universal Al Quoz Sprint). This seems quite strange to me. Surely the horse industry realizes by now that synthetic racing is similar to turf racing and does not particularly reward the speed that is so valuable at stud? It seems odd that owners would be trying to make stallions by having them win on synthetic. I suppose that makes sense only from the standpoint that a synthetic win is something new to add to the resume for a lot of international horses.

The UAE Derby was probably colt-filled because it generally takes a certain amount of precocity to have the resume for the race: horses that are gelded are often backwards, and not on the path to such a race.

Gelding/non-gelding practices probably differ by country, and some races logically had some countries represented in higher proportion than others. But something of that nature was not behind the Al Quoz Sprint phenomenon, as five of the eleven geldings in the race were bred in the southern hemisphere, and six in the northern hemisphere.