The sun rises in the east, sets in the west and Australia breeds the best sprinters in the world; some things you just have to accept as fact.

Wait, hang on. Not the sun thing, we are prepared to go with that – even if the smog here in Hong Kong on most days means there is no concrete evidence there is a sun at all.

But Aussie-bred sprinters – are they really the best? Ask an Australian and they’ll tell you straight, “Flamin’ oath they are.”

They are a parochial lot in that way – it’s also the best country in the world, for instance – but back to the matter at hand: the “we breed the best sprinters” statement, one that in recent times really hasn’t been put under much scrutiny.

Sunday’s blockbuster clash between Australian-trained stars Chautauqua and Buffering is being billed as a head-to-head clash on neutral ground for the title of World’s Best Sprinter (#WBS), an imaginary title belt that usually gets passed around between winners of the 350 or so Australian black-type sprints. It is as if Peniaphobia, Gold-Fun and Aerovelocity won’t even be there – in fact, one Australian radio pundit and scribe didn’t even know who Aerovelocity was last week.

Sunday’s HK$10 million race is where actions can speak louder than words, as winning away from home has become one of the truest representations of a horse’s worth – and it is something Australian-trained sprinters haven’t done enough of in recent times.

The “Aussies breed the world’s best sprinters” crowing probably started in 2003 when Choisir took Royal Ascot apart with back-to-back feature sprint wins on the first and last day of the world’s premier race meeting.

Choisir really was a trailblazer and although it took a few years, the Aussies arrived in numbers and from 2006 to 2012 an Australian-bred sprinter won at least one of the Royal Ascot feature sprints on five of seven occasions – although it should be added that the five wins came from a total of 23 total starts. Still, that constitutes something of a golden era and that’s when the status of Australian-bred sprinters was seemingly set in stone.

That record includes the efforts of Starspangledbanner, then under the care of Aidan O’Brien, who added the July Cup to a Diamond Jubilee Stakes win in 2010.

In 2012 Ortensia won the Al Quoz Sprint in Dubai before adding two Group race triumphs in England, while it is now fast approaching four years since Black Caviar scored her famous 2012 Diamond Jubilee Stakes win. Since Ortensia’s Nunthorpe, though, there hasn’t been as much activity since, although Brazen Beau went agonisingly close to winning the Diamond Jubilee last year. Buffering finally put Australia back on the map in Dubai with his stirring Al Quoz triumph last month.

What about Black Caviar? Here’s another seemingly universally accepted and unchallenged “truth” – “Black Caviar, the best sprinter of all time” even gets thrown about.

Fair enough, you can’t argue with that unbeaten record, but – and allow me to prepare for a hail of online abuse for a moment – there are a few well-respected Australian judges that contend she might not, heaven forbid, have even been the best of her generation. That title may belong to Japanese freak Lord Kanaloa.

True, the people that think this, sometimes known as the “Lord K-faction”, meet in secret rooms and communicate using encrypted coded messages through fear they will be deported and stripped of their Australian passports. They dare not tweet it, but they think it.

Lord Kanaloa won two Hong Kong Sprints in a manner that suggested it would have at least taken Black Caviar’s best to beat him – and perhaps Sha Tin is a better venue for a world title decider, rather than the undulating straight of Ascot.

Australian-bred sprinters dominated the Hong Kong Sprint from the race’s inception in 1999, winning the first 11 editions, but since 2010 there has been a shift and the honour role reads South Africa, Ireland (twice), Japan (twice) and New Zealand. No, US readers, New Zealand is not part of Australia.

So despite Australian-breds forming more than 40 per cent of the Hong Kong horse population – 494 of 1,215 horses at last count – and winning more than one-third of the races over the past five seasons, the locally trained Aussies or visitors, not that many have tried, haven’t been able to win the biggest 1,200m race on the calendar.

Of course, this “drought” could just be an anomaly – two of the next big things in the sprint ranks here are Australian-breds, Thewizardofoz and Lucky Bubbles, and they arrive on the Group One scene on Sunday at what could be the right time.

The emergence of the Chairman’s Sprint Prize as an event every bit as good as the Hong Kong Sprint gives Sha Tin two showpiece events worthy of world ranking status and the chance for one of the two great Australian raiders to put the land down under back on the international map.

Get the title belt, and the #WBS hashtags, ready.