Caulfield Cup to Japan
The leaden skies and chill winds that blew round Caulfield on its big day matched the mood music surrounding a racing industry that has been bashed from pillar to post during a tumultuous spring carnival.
Last week it was the revelations about animal cruelty surrounding the disgraced and now disqualified former champion trainer Darren Weir which had cast a pall over the biggest month of the racing year.
And then, 48 hours before the ‘‘superest’’ Saturday of all, when the Caulfield Cup and The Everest were staged within an hour of each other, the sport was rocked by even more horrific revelations in an ABC documentary which highlighted in gory detail the cruel and inhumane treatment meted out to former racehorses in a Queensland slaughterhouse.
None of that could be directly sheeted back to the participants at Caulfield, not the owners, trainers or punters who thronged through the gates despite the less than seasonal weather.
The Caulfield Cup once again delivered an international triumph, with the Japanese raider Mer De Glace proving too strong for the Australian-trained Vow And Declare (by an American stallion Declaration Of War), with the formerly English-trained son of wonder horse Frankel, Mirage Dancer, third.
It was racing’s international dimension that was the strongest thread to this success, a second Japanese triumph in this race and the first for a young Australian jockey who had the foresight and adventurous spirit to travel to Japan and forge contacts there in an attempt to find some good horses to ride during the Melbourne spring carnival.
Damian Lane, the 25-year-old West Australian who has called Victoria home since he shifted here as a teenage apprentice to join the Matt Ellerton and Simon Zahra stable, has always been prepared to march to the beat of a different drum.
A singular talent, Lane has always been prepared to back his own judgment: and it has paid spectacular dividends in what has been a breakout year.
In the autumn he won the Golden Slipper aboard the Godolphin outsider Kiamichi, a coming-of-age triumph in one of Sydney’s signature races.
He now has two of the nation’s ‘‘big four’’ races. And who is to say he couldn’t land the other two, the Cox Plate and the Melbourne Cup.
On Saturday he will climb aboard the Cox Plate favourite, Lys Gracieux, another Japanese galloper who comes into the weight-for-age championship of Australia with even greater credentials than Mer De Glace arrived at Caulfield.
And 10 days after that he could try to do the double and land the Melbourne Cup, on his Caulfield Cup hero if connections decide to do the double and he is not penalised too much.
■ Kiwi horse The Chosen One, which had drawn the widest alley (22), dropped back to last but mounted a run in the straight before coming to ninth.