Race dramas
SO the Melbourne Cup has been run and won.
The race-day excitement has died down, Monday sickies that were taken to make it a long weekend are now forgotten, and many punters’ pockets are anything from a little to a lot lighter. Still life goes on. Well, it does for the owners, trainers, jockeys, investors, 90,000 punters and fashionistas who made it through the downpour to get to the track on that rainy Tuesday just three days ago.
As readers will probably be aware, I am neither a horse racing fan nor a particularly committed animal advocate, despite the fact that I still miss our last, longlived companion animal — Jazz, the singular and singularly objectionable cat.
Although now gone, Jazz outlived all expectations and remained dedicated and irascible to the last.
She lived long and well and died with a certain quiet feline dignity.
But life ended abruptly with a bullet for one of the stars of Tuesday’s big show — the race that stops a nation.
British raider The Cliffsofmoher tragically broke down with a shattered shoulder soon after the start of the race.
As if in denial, the nation had looked away by the time the stewards and the veterinarians began to erect that fateful green screen around the stricken horse.
Shielded from the public gaze the big bay stallion met his grisly fate even before the surviving members of the field passed the winning post.
The green screen spared the sensitivities of the rich, the famous, the viewers and the punters, from the sight of The Cliffsofmoher’s somewhat inconvenient public execution.
But he was just a horse, albeit a fabulously expensive one, as are nearly all Melbourne Cup starters.
Somewhere there will be a strapper or a groom who cries for The Cliffsofmoher, but they will be precious few. He was not a pet and certainly not so to his connections.
The Cliffsofmoher was a multimillion-dollar investment — far too valuable to be thought of as a pet, a sentient being, an animal with feelings, warm blood and a heart.
The inert carcass of poor old The Cliffsofmoher (he was only five) is by now on his way to a dog food factory somewhere in country Victoria, destined to finish his career in a can on a supermarket shelf and not in the winner’s circle. “That’s racing” as they say. As a footnote, and possibly as the precursor to another racing story — but mercifully not by me — it’s worth mentioning here that as we head toward the closing stages of Victoria’s enormously rich and popular Spring Racing Carnival, some local observers have expressed growing concern about the state of the racing industry in Geelong.
We all recall the excitement of 2002, when Media Puzzle won the Geelong Cup and went on to win the Melbourne Cup a week later.
As an aside, just like The Cliffsofmoher, Media Puzzle also fell foul to instant euthanasia in June 2, 2006, at Royal Ascot when he broke a foreleg.
Media Puzzle heralded a boom period for the Geelong Racing Club, which, among other things, instituted the Media Puzzle Club to boost club membership and raise funds for the construction of a new committee room.
For a contribution of around $2000 you could become a member of the Media Puzzle Club, with associated benefits that included special race days and generous hospitality arrangements in the grandstand restaurant. The committee room was duly built but the Media Puzzle Club — after initially thriving — has recently been summarily disbanded by the Geelong Racing Club.
The boom period for Geelong racing also included construction of a synthetic-surface racing track running inside the turf track at Geelong’s Breakwater course, which became —very profitably for the Victoria Racing Club and the Geelong Racing Club — the default venue for other scheduled Victorian regional race meetings whose tracks were deemed to be unusable for reasons of bad weather or other factors.
However, quite recently, the all-powerful VRC has — without fanfare — switched its affections from Geelong to Ballarat, where it is constructing an identical synthetic track for the same purpose. Ballarat has now replaced Geelong as the main default venue for Victorian regional racing.
The expensive synthetic track at Geelong’s Breakwater course is now being dug up, with the club’s schedule of meetings much reduced. Meetings in future will be run on the much higher-maintenance turf track. The old track. Everything new is old again.