Melbourne Cup fairytale
FLEMINGTON Park was an emotional fantasyland at the conclusion of the 155th running of the Melbourne Cup yesterday because it was difficult to believe the result could be anything but a fairytale.
Michelle Payne became the first ever woman jockey to win "the race which stops a nation", but that she did it on an unheralded 100-1 shot whose strapper (groom) Stevie Payne is her down syndrome brother would hardly have been believable as a movie script.
The first hurdle for the winning horse, Prince Of Penzance, a six-year-old New Zealand-bred Pentire gelding trained by Darren Weir, was negotiated when Stevie Payne drew the exact number he wanted, number one, in the barrier position draw earlier in the week.
Michelle’s plan of preserving Prince Of Penzance’s energy until the final stages initially went awry when he “walked out’’ the gate, and she had to roust him for position.
However, she soon found herself exactly where she had intended to be behind Max Dynamite and Criterion. She could not believe how well Pride Of Penzance was travelling at the 600m mark, but was still calm enough to remember her trainer’s most drummed in instruction, “If you are travelling well entering the straight, count to ten (before you let him go)’’ She couldn’t recall how far she counted, but when Prince Of Penzance burst into the clear he had winner written all over him.
She punched the air with her whip hand when crossing the line clear of Max Dynamite and Criterion.
The connections celebrated wildly below the stands and one owner, Sandy McGregor, wore an expression of disbelief.
Prince Of Penzance had become just the fourth horse to win at odds that long, and the first in 75 years. One punter reportedly struck a bet of Aus$1000 when the horse was paying Aus$101 with Sportsbet earlier in the day.
The owners apparently consist of “a podia- trist, a couple of engineers, an IT consultant, a solutions expert and a producer’’ and refer to their prized horse as “POP’’. A few of them of them had kept his purchase a secret from their wives and girlfriends when first buying him as a yearling for just AU$50,000.
“A lot of the owners’’ had apparently wanted to replace Michelle, despite her having ridden “POP’’ in over 20 previous races.
Michelle briefly took a swipe at them and others, calling racing “such a chauvinistic sport’’, before going on to explain that there is so much more to race riding than just brute strength.
However, she did thank all of the owners, “especially the McGregor family.’’
Weir’s relationship with the McGregor family goes back as far as the day he took out his trainer's license in 1995, having learned the ropes from the like of the legendary Colin Hayes among others. He trained for Sandy McGregor's father Stuart back then.
This was Weir's fifth Melbourne Cup runner and his second for Sandy McGregor, whose English-bred Signoff finished fourth last year. “It’s great just have a runner in it,’’ Weir had said earlier in the week.
Michelle later shared a pre-race reply to Frankie Dettori's question asking what she would be doing on the night of the Cup. She had answered she would be celebrating her win. It was ironic that Dettori would later be on the runner up Max Dynamite, trained by Irish jumps racing legend Willie Mullins. However, not so fantastic for Dettori was that he earned a $20,000 fine and a one-month suspension for ‘severely’ interfering with fellow rider Jimmy Cassidy.
Another regrettable sideshow was the threetimes Melbourne Cup runner up, the ten-yearold Red Cadeaux, having to be pulled up before the line in his fifth Cup run. The amazing Ed Dunlop-trained globetrotter later had surgery on a fractured fetlock and his condition is not currently life threatening but he will require further surgery. Thirty-year-old Michelle Payne's dream of winning the race was hatched three years earlier, “When I won on this horse here as a three-year-old, I said he felt like a Melbourne Cup horse.’’
However, she thought her career was over about a year later when cracking vertebrae in one of a number of serious falls during a career which began as a 15-year-old. However, through the encouragement of her father, who was widowed when Michelle was only six months old, she was soon back in the saddle.
Michelle is the youngest of a family of eleven siblings, seven of whom had been jockeys before her. She has had a long association with the Darren Weir stable and praised the "unbelievable" trainer for delivering Pride Of Penzance in his best possible condition.
This was Michelle’s fifth Gr 1 victory, her first being for the legendary trainer Bart Cummings Allez Wonder in the Toorak Handicap in 2009. Cummings kept her aboard for the Caulfield Cup a week later and she became only the third female to ride in that famous race.
Her immediate post-race interview was peppered with Bert le Clos like “Un-believables’’ and the result will definitely go down as just that.
Brave lady’s life
An earlier chapter in the brave lady’s life saw her sidelined in March 2004 after falling heavily in a race at Sandown Racecourse in Melbourne, fracturing her skull and bruising her brain. As a result of her prolonged recovery period, including a further fall where she fractured her wrist, Payne was granted a three-month extension to her apprenticeship.
Pride Of Penzance is equally courageous having recovered from two joint operations before surviving a severe colic attack last Summer. Stevie Payne, who is said to have a wonderful rapport with horses, concluded the post-race interview fittingly by simply saying “Brilliant’’.
Australia might soon have another blockbuster racing movie to match the epic “Pharlap" and the recent success “The Cup’’.