Full Melbourne Cup reports, details:
FRANKIE Dettori was exasperated, almost angry.
“He was just flat, flat,” the Italian megastar said as he weighed in.
“He just wasn’t the same horse.”
In his 16th Melbourne Cup, 25 years after his first all the way back in 1993, Dettori had missed yet another chance to scale the mountain for the first time.
This year was arguably his best shot, given the plum ride on Almandin, last year’s winner and smashed by punters — later to be very disgruntled punters — in to equal $7 favourite in the minutes before the race.
Dettori, now 47, a winner of the biggest races around the world, had never actually sat on Almandin before yesterday.
He arrived in Melbourne only on Monday, from the US, and didn’t check in to the jockeys’ room at Flemington until 12.30 on Cup Day. The race was at 3pm. Dettori doesn’t do warmup rides, which may have proven to be not a bad call when Joao Moreira, a rider in the same class as the Ital- ian, fell in race four and lost his Cup start.
Dettori was bubbly and smiling when he came back out, all dressed up, silks on, for the national anthem.
In the minutes before he did get on Almandin, a full 10 per cent of all TAB fixed odds bets on his shoulders, he bumped into Lloyd Williams.
They have been friends for 20 years. Almandin was one of Williams’ six runners.
Dettori was widely panned for his horror show ride on Wicklow Brave in last year’s race. He rode wide all the way. Really wide.
This year was about redemption, and delivering on his “world class” status.
Almandin had been flat in his last outing, but the Williams camp was confident, as, clearly, were punters.
But early on, it looked like another “oh no” effort.
He clashed with Single Gaze then found himself three wide from barrier 14.
It wasn’t until the 1600m mark he even got cover, as Tiberian strode up around him. But the French horse kept going forward, leaving Frankie wider than he wanted.
As they turned for home the field spread out. Dettori and Almandin were still mid-field, but moving.
He needed to get out, and nudged Single Gaze again to get in the clear.
Dettori went for home, closer to the middle of the track than the rail. But Almandin just didn’t respond.
The surge from last year was nowhere to be seen. The toll of all that extra ground covered, the ride no one who backed Almandin wanted, maybe proved too much.
“Yeah I was stuck three wide but the horse was flat,” Dettori explained.
“He never carried it today and he ran like a flat horse.”
Dettori’s 16th hit and run Cup mission had finished as the previous 15, without the Cup, and all that punter’s cash invested so faithfully in a jockey of the highest calibre, gone.