Murray Bridge horse The Map is the people’s champion in this year’s Melbourne Cup
Owners Dan Clarken and Oopy MacGillivray see their $35,000 Murray Bridge horse as the “people’s champion” as she takes on the race that stops the nation.
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Out at Dan Clarken and Oopy MacGillivray’s property just outside Murray Bridge, The Map has pride of place. She has the biggest pen, with the best views over the dam and out over the paddocks to the road.
And fair enough too. The Map is about to become to the first South Australian horse to run in the Melbourne Cup since Alcopop in 2009. “She likes to be where she can see everything,’’ MacGillivray says. “She is a curious horse.’’
Clarken and MacGillivray are also hoping The Map can capture Australian hearts in the race that stops a nation – The Map filling the role as the underdog in a race populated with overseas born-and-bred million dollar horses and their multi-millionaire and billionaire owners. By comparison, The Map was bought from the bargain basement.
“She becomes the people’s champion,’’ Clarken says. “The underdog is always the people’s champion. There seems to be, just anecdotally, from our point of view, interest that The Map has engendered in people who are basically once-a-year racehorse people and are just so excited,” MacGillivray adds. “And then even the ones that follow racing all the time, it’s just like, ‘How good’.’’
Out here in the backblocks of Murray Bridge, a five-minute drive from the town’s new racecourse, is a long way from the glitz and glamour of Flemington on the first Tuesday in November. This is grassroots racing.
The 58-year-old Clarken and 52-year-old MacGillivray are down a couple of staff who have been injured in race falls and they are doing most of the work themselves. Apart from “Mapo”, they have another 15 horses to look after on their property.
Which means loading them up on floats to take to the racecourse, bringing them back, giving them a swim in the dam, attaching them to walkers, feeding them, grooming them.
But what makes it all worthwhile is when you find a horse like The Map. It is the first time Clarken and MacGillivray have had a horse in the Cup. And there is a sense they are still pinching themselves that they have finally made it to Flemington for the big race. The odds against The Map and her trainers making it to racing’s biggest stage were always steep.
“The bigger trainers have a monopoly on it, they’ve got dozens of horses nominated in it,” MacGillivray says. “So the chance of finding one and the chance of actually getting it there … you know it’s just very small.”
The Melbourne Cup is a long race, it’s one for the stayers. It’s run over 3200m, or two miles in the old money, and Clarken believes The Map has the distance in her. “She can run two miles, a lot of them can’t, a lot of them are guessing they can run two miles. We know we can,” he says.
Clarken and MacGillivray came across The Map almost by accident. More than four years ago, they were at Morphettville racecourse for the annual yearling sales. They had a bunch of prospects they wanted to check out. The Map was not one of them. The way it works is you spend a couple of days checking out the horses then come back on sale day and make your bid.
So Clarken and MacGillivray walked around, sale book in hand, and kept seeing this one horse pop up for a look at them. “Every day we were there this particular horse would come out,” Clarken says. “We didn’t have it (on our list), we’d never had it marked to look at, but this particular horse would come out and stand up.”
Eventually, Clarken asked MacGillivray to find out the lot number of this horse “just to amuse me”. They discovered it was sired by Alpine Eagle, a horse they had seen win its first race and recalled being impressed by his speed.
But this was a horse not quite looking its best.
“She was no oil painting, you wouldn’t say ‘Wow’,’’ Clarken says. She had come over from Tasmania and by all reports hadn’t travelled well and had been a bit seasick. Clarken describes her as “light as a cork” but the closer he looked the more he liked what he saw.
“The frame was there,” he says. “You can see it and the head and the depth of girth, it was all there.” MacGillivray could see something else.
“There was also a softness to her, you could tell she had a real character,’’ she says.
Convinced they were seeing qualities others were missing, a budget of $50,000 was set. They bought the horse for $35,000. The breeder Richard Sadek wanted $80,000 but was so optimistic about the future for The Map, remained as a part-owner. The Map is owned by seven individual owners and three syndicates. The syndicates are farmers, builders and stock agents. Sydney publican Blair Hayden, owner of the Lord Nelson in The Rocks is a part-owner.
Ah, yes, the name. The Map. It’s a filly from Tasmania. The Map (of Tassie).
Clarken and MacGillivray knew she would need space to develop. That was one reason so many others had overlooked The Map.
“She’s not an early going two-year-old, she’s going to take time. People don’t want to spend the money and have to wait,” Clarken says.
Both Clarken and MacGillivray are horse people from way back. Clarken’s father was a plumber, but trained horses for harness racing then thoroughbreds. He remembers his first time riding “fast work” for his father at Gawler. He was 10 years old.
“I had one taste of it and I said I’m never going to sit in the back of the sulky again,” he says. “This is so cool. They go so quick. You’re perched up there and the breeze is going between your ears and it’s just cool.”
He thought of being a jumps jockey, but his mum put a stop to that. He worked for a few trainers and took his own licence when he was 27. He trained horses, ran a stud, which is where he met MacGillivray. And he had some success, most notably winning the Group One Blue Diamond Stakes with Miracles of Life in 2013.
He reckons if he wins the Cup, he will have just about done it all. “For me, personally, to train the best two-year-old race in Victoria, and train the winner of that, and then to train the best staying race in Victoria, to train the winner of that – I don’t have to do another thing … that is me. I’m done. I’m done,” he says.
MacGillivray grew up on a farm near Dunkeld in Victoria’s Grampians. Her mother is still at the farm as well MacGillivray’s sons, Angus and Max. It wasn’t racehorses early on for MacGillivray. But she had a pony when she was four and the farm work was done on stock horses. When she was a teenager she started show jumping and three-day eventing and was pretty good at it.
“I’ve probably ridden every type of breed that you can imagine at some stage,’’ she says.
Oopy MacGillivray’s given name was Julia. The story goes when she was born she was “small and round’’ like an old thruppence coin. Her father gave his daughter the nickname Throopy. But Julia’s older sister couldn’t say the word and Throopy became Oopy. Which stuck.
In 2000 Oopy moved to Adelaide and married businessman Duncan MacGillivray the following year. Duncan MacGillivray had achieved fame in the 1990s with his invention of the Two Dogs hard lemonade. He also owned pubs including the Port Dock and the Bull and Bear Alehouse. The couple had two sons, Angus and Max, but MacGillivray died of a heart attack on a family holiday in Bali aged 66 in 2014.
Duncan and Oopy owned horses, one even trained by Clarken, but there was little time to jump on a horse. “We were very busy with our different businesses and things and so I actually hardly rode probably for that 14 years,’’ she says.
When her husband died, her sons were only 12 and 10. Everyone had their own bit of well-meaning advice on the best way to cope.
“A lot of very sensible people said to me, ‘Well, you’ll be all right if you just get a nice sensible job, Oopy, something with a safe income,’” she says. “Anyway, about a minute after they said that my brain said, ‘You know what? If there’s one thing I learned from losing Duncan it’s that life is short. Sometimes too short and you’ve got to do the things that you want to do.’” So MacGillivray went back to horses. She started riding again. Clarken had a couple of her horses and she went down to help.
“I got back on and it probably took me three-six months to get fit enough again to do it and to hold the racehorses in a gallop … things like that you never forget, it’s like riding a bike and it was fantastic to be back,’’ she says.
It was a form of therapy. One that took her back to her teenage years. “You know when you had an argument with your mother, you’d cry on your pony’s shoulder and say: ‘You’re the only one that loves me.’’’ Even now, she says it’s important to go riding as often as possible.
“Daniel will tell you if I go too many days without riding a horse I’m hard to live with,” she says. “If he thinks I’m getting crabby it’s ‘right-oh, you’d better ride another one’.”
Horses are the only thing they argue about, they laugh. Clarken says: “When we got together I said, ‘You and I are going to get along absolutely fantastically, there is only one thing we are going to blue about and that’s horses.’”
“We have the odd robust conversation about how to handle a horse or how to deal with a horseor what gear to put on it but usually once it’s over, we’ve made a decision,” MacGillivray adds. Clarken says because both had been in long-term relationships previously, they were both a bit older and wiser.
“We’ve had the prickles knocked off us,” he says. “So we actually do get along quite well.”
Not that marriage is on the horizon. MacGillivray says there is too much “paperwork’’. “He’s not going anywhere. I don’t think,” MacGillivray says, prompting Clarken: “I think she came to me just worn out enough, so I can’t go anywhere.”
Now, with a date with the Melbourne Cup on the horizon, MacGillivray and Clarken are priming The Map for the perfect run. Last year, The Map was the 25th horse in a field limited to 24. This year’s run was guaranteed when The Map won the 2800m Andrew Ramsden Stakes at Flemington in May.
One of the key questions will be to find the right jockey. Local hoop Jamie Kah was a possibility but she is riding Point King. Kah has ridden The Map before and has a long history with MacGillivray and Clarken, living with them while she was establishing her career. Kah was on board when The Map ran a close second in this year’s Adelaide Cup and piloted her to a win in the Queen Elizabeth II Cup. Kah also rode The Map to victory last year on Melbourne Cup Day, winning the Macca’s Run.
Kah was reunited with The Map in September when the Melbourne Cup stopped in Murray Bridge as part of a national tour, the gleaming gold $750,000 trophy a magnet for the early morning gatherers who had assembled to watch The Map do a little light track work.
“It has been great to visit Dan and Oopy while on tour, who I think of like family, and I am so proud of what they have achieved with The Map and I think it means a lot to South Australia to know that they have such a talented horse with a guaranteed spot in the race that stops a nation,’’ Kah says. “She is just a push-button to ride, meaning she will do whatever you want her to do and she’s so genuine and you need that in a horse.”
MacGillivray and Clarken believe spring brings out the best in The Map.
“Spring is her time of year, she always looks absolutely Mickey Mouse,” Clarken says.
The rest of the country will see just what The Map has to offer on Tuesday, November 5.
There, among the best horses in the world from France, Ireland, Japan, Britain and New Zealand will be Murray Bridge’s own The Map.
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