The road to the Melbourne Cup

The eyes of the racing world will focus in on Keeneland for the Breeders’ Cup this weekend, but this year, this particular set of eyes will only stray briefly from the prize of the Melbourne Cup that will take place the following Tuesday. Having been a regular and enamoured attendee of the Breeders’ Cup in recent years, it wasn’t an easy call to forego it in preference for Melbourne. Of course, it is possible to do both, as a bunch of trainers, jockeys and Nick Luck will demonstrate this year.

However, everyone has told me that the Melbourne Cup is about the build-up as much as the race itself, so I’m here for the long haul and it’ll be a Breeders’ Cup breakfast for me on Saturday and Sunday morning from Melbourne.

I arrived in Melbourne a week ago, so I’ve had plenty of time to get a feel for it all before things really ramp up in the build-up to the Melbourne Cup. As is human nature, we can’t help but make comparisons, both good and bad, to what we know well when entering unfamiliar territory and it is through that lens that I will offer my initial observations through.

The first thing that struck me when getting in amongst it all in Melbourne is just how much racing is condensed into the metropolitan area. With the worldwide trend for many decades having been for racecourses and greyhound tracks to be eaten up and absorbed by urbanisation, it is remarkable just how many major racecourses are thriving so close to the city centre in Melbourne.

Flemington and Moonee Valley are both within 7km of the city centre. Caulfield is just 10km away in the opposite direction. Flemington and Caulfield are brilliantly served by public transport, with train stations right outside the tracks. Moonee Valley has a train station less a kilometre from the track.

Paris can make a comparable boast of having three racecourses so close to the city centre, but the key difference here is that the people flood to the tracks in Melbourne whereas the Parisian tracks struggle to consistently attract big crowds. Flemington is likely to attract over 80,000 racegoers on both Derby Day this Saturday and on Melbourne Cup next week.

On that point, I find the way that they structure the carnivals here to be very interesting. In our part of the world, racecourses stage multi-day meetings on consecutive days with very few exceptions. At Flemington, the schedule goes Derby Day on Saturday, Melbourne Cup day on Tuesday, Oaks day on Thursday and Champions Stakes day on Saturday, with multiple formal and informal events filling the gaps.

Everyone will be different, but even without having experienced it myself yet, I find this structure very appealing. It gives each day time to breath, facilitating fuller promotion of and reflection on each day. Our biggest meetings in this part of world range from four to seven consecutive days and at times it can all feel like a blur. I wouldn’t dare suggest that such changes should be made at home, but it does show that there are more than one way to do things that can work well and if a racecourse were to experiment with such a structure for a multi-day race meetings in the UK or Ireland it would be fascinating to see how it would play out.

The other difference that has been striking to observe is the sheer level of build-up to the big meetings over here. The volume of events and functions that one can partake in is wild. Between launches, trackwork mornings, preview events, barrier draws, dinners and multiple racedays in the Melbourne area, the schedule is full-on. I’m told that I’ve seen nothing yet and that everything ramps up many levels in the days leading up to the Cup, but already the amount of visibility and mainstream media coverage of the racing is striking. It makes the level of build-up to all bar the Cheltenham Festival in our part of the world look pretty limited.

That leads me onto another aspect of racing in Australia. For as long as I’ve been in the game, I’ve heard the mind-boggling stats about the level of participation in racehorse ownership amongst the Australian population. The latest figure I can find is that are there are just over 140,000 registered owners in Australia from a population of around 28 million. This level of racehorse ownership is just off the scale compared to any other racing nation on a per-head basis. Those are the numbers on paper, but the extent to which one can feel it on the ground is quite something.

There is of course a selection bias at play as most of the people I end up talking to tend to have a strong interest in racing, but the sheer volume of people that I’ve met that have told me about the horses they are involved in has been wild. It is far from just lower-level animals either, as so many high-achieving horses down here are owned by large syndicates. There is nothing like skin in the game to drive passion and interest and this couldn’t be clearer in Australia.

To step back from the broad and bring it back to the specifics of this year’s Melbourne Cup, the dominant story is likely to be the numerical challenges fielded by Ciaron Maher to head up the home defence for Australia versus Joseph O’Brien for Ireland. Maher has been carrying all before him in Australia and after a stellar run of results in recent weeks and he could have as many of eight runners in the race. Joseph O’Brien has brought a big team of horses halfway across the world to try and win the race for a third time and he is currently set to have five or possibly six of the 24 runners in the race.

Maher has been getting the better of the opening exchanges with O’Brien’s team in the Geelong Cup and Moonee Valley Gold Cup, but the longer trip of the Melbourne Cup and its status as the be-all and end-all target for O’Brien’s runners raises hope that the Irish flag could potentially end up draped around the Melbourne Cup once again. Mind, there is plenty of water to go under the bridge in the next week, with the mandatory CT scans taking place for all prospective runners in the coming days. Watch this space!