PRIZE FLARE GAME
BEGG URGES AUSSIES TO GET BEHIND CUP LOCALS
GRAHAME Begg has urged Australians to channel their parochialism and put their support behind the local contingent taking on the might of Melbourne Cup favourite Deauville Legend and other internationals in Tuesday’s $8 million race.
Begg will have his first Melbourne Cup runner this year when seven-year-old mare Lunar Flare lines up at Flemington, and he is hopeful she can run a big race.
The mare will be the subject of a vets inspection on race day morning after presenting lameness in the off fore on Monday. Begg is an outstanding trainer who deliberately keeps a boutique stable of only 30 horses in work at his Mornington base.
He couldn’t be more proud of his mare, or his stable for executing a plan to get Lunar Flare into the Cup – the race that her sire Fiorente won back in 2013.
What gives him even more satisfaction is that his mare is a homegrown and home-bred product, which has been a rarity in terms of the Cup for much of the past decade and a half.
“It’s great to be able to have a Melbourne Cup runner and more so, a locally-grown product,” Begg said.
“It’s incredible. Look I have never set out to have one (a Cup runner), but I have never really had the right horse either.”
Until maybe now …
“I just get sick of everyone just writing them (the locals) off. Look, they might not be good enough at times, I don’t know. But gee, let’s get behind them,” he said.
Lunar Flare won the Moonee Valley Cup last year which set in train a plan to contest this year’s Cup.
She won the 2022 Bart Cummings which guaranteed a start in the Cup and she backed it up with a slashing Cup trial when second to Francesco Guardi in the Moonee Valley Gold Cup on Cox Plate Day.
“When she drew a wide gate, we said ‘back you go, you have to have a resting run and conserve your energy and you have to do that on the first Tuesday, too’,” Begg said.
“Her run was brilliant.
“She drops to 51.5 kilos (in the Cup), she has got a winnable weight, put it that way. Whether she has got the class, we will wait and see.
“She has never run the two miles (3200m). But if she can give herself a resting run and get the right ride, things could fall in her favour, even though she is going to need some luck.”
In-form jockey Michael Dee will pilot Lunar Flare in the Melbourne Cup, fresh from adding a Victoria Derby to his Group 1 CV on Manzoice after winning the Caulfield Cup on Durston.
As the son of Hall of Fame trainer Neville Begg, Grahame was always destined to become a horseman.
Neville only had a handful of Cup runners in his legendary training career, and now Grahame will have his first horse to contest the great race.