Melbourne Cup 2015: Michelle Payne’s determination to defy odds sees her claim incredible win

MICHELLE Payne was not brought up to give up. When you’re poor and there are 10 of you, there is no choice but to stick at it, or else get left behind, writes Matt Stewart.

Racing - Melbourne Cup Day

TIMES were tough on the Payne farm. Back then, up on the outskirts of Ballarat in the late 1980s, none of the kids was famous. There were just lots of them.

Mary Payne had died in a car accident in 1986 while driving three of her cherub brood to school. Miraculously, not one child was hurt.

She left behind a stoic husband — a New Zealander called Paddy who’d come to Ballarat to farm and train horses — and 10 kids, reduced tragically to nine in 2007 when 36-year-old Brigid died not from a race fall but a seizure.

The older girls, like Maree and Therese, played mum to the youngest two, Michelle and Stevie.

Stevie was a bit different to the rest because he had Down syndrome. But the family had always been like a warm blanket for Stevie, with little Michelle, who was just a toddler when her mother died, his constant companion.

As the older kids rode ponies, then racehorses, Michelle and Stevie would invent fun like eating dirt. They were always filthy.

The Payne’s were dirt poor but their old man, a former jumps jockey, pointed each of them towards ponies, as if ponies were the only ticket out for kids who would never make university.

When Michelle was little, female riders were an oddity, a novelty.

Therese and Maree changed that and rode through the cusp of one era to another, never quite bridging it as Michelle would, so astonishingly, on Melbourne Cup day.

When Maree and Therese rode at country meetings, usually in the west of the state, they’d get changed in a caravan because no-one had ever heard of a female jockeys’ room.

Eight of the 10 Payne kids were to become jockeys, including the youngest who is now the most famous; more than that, she is a woman who will be preserved in history as an icon.

Michelle never wanted to be “important’’ in history, just to be as good jockey, maybe better than her sisters and mentioned in the same breath as her older brother Patrick.

“But Paddy never won a Melbourne Cup,’’ she beamed as cameras clicked wildly in the post-race press conference after the 30-year-old became the first woman to win our most famous race.

Michelle Payne spends a quiet moment in the jockeys’ room with the Melbourne Cup after her win on Prince Of Penzance. Picture: Colleen Petch

The Paynes were not brought up to give up. When you are poor and there are 10 of you, there is no choice but to stick at it, or else get left behind or lost.

Michelle would become a more successful rider than Maree and Therese, partly because her sisters put a crack in the glass ceiling, partly because Michelle refused to stop.

Along the journey she suffered a number of serious falls that had shattered her body and bruised her brain.

After a fall at Donald in 2012 she fractured five vertebrae and broke five ribs. A pretty face now had a jagged scar, a war wound.

In an earlier fall she had bleeding to the brain and her family, even her father who’d always told her never to give up, begged her to stop.

Briefly, she thought about accepting the tip, considered becoming a beautician and briefly thought buying a cafe.

But when Paddy Payne first introduced his youngest to a pony, he put her on a life journey.

Her motivation has always to prove she was as good as the boys and her anger and frustration at having to work twice as hard for half the chance fuelled her. “It just drives me crazy,’’ she said after her Cup win, a momentary distraction from her great feat.

There was motivation, too, in the most simple thing. Half the boys ride for the money, Payne rides for the sheer joy.

She’d always pledged she would retire at 28 because as much as she loved to ride, she’d almost killed herself a half dozen times.

Payne had always said she’d hate to be lying paralysed on the track — as she was for a terrifying 30 seconds at Donald in 2012 — knowing she could have called it quits.

But she stuck at it. Many owners still preferred boys, so Michelle would simply badger owners and trainers into submission.

She would work harder, travel longer, dream harder.

There was so much going on in the immediate aftermath of yesterday’s Melbourne Cup that it was difficult to know where to look, what to think.

A rank outsider had won the strongest race ever run in Australia. They’d come from all over the world, the superstars of the sport, yet the race was won by a cheap horse trained by a shy bloke from Berriwillock and owned partly by a group of blokes who’d never had much luck with nags and threw the dice one last time.

Darren Weir raises the Melbourne Cup winner's trophy after Prince of Penzance’s win.

Jarrod McLean, a trainer in his own right who now works Weir horses on the beach at Warrnambool, declared Weir “the greatest trainer in Australia — he has to be’’.

Internationals melted away in the mounting yard as Weir bear-hugged his staff and owners — “me mates’’ – and found his young daughters.

There had been surprises in the Melbourne Cup before but no-one could believe this.

Then, as Weir’s most trusted and loved foreman Stevie Payne stood shaking in the mounting yard clutching the lead clip he would attach to Prince Of Penzance’s bridle, his little sister, with that jagged scar on her cherub face, emerged through that glorious laneway into the mounting yard.

She smiled in shock and joy and waved her arms as Stevie spoke to Channel Seven and declared her ride “a 10 out of 10.’’

Somewhere in that human swirl she was approaching were her sisters. The crowd went bonkers.

The horse had barely raised a sweat because the youngest and now most famous of all the Payne kids had ridden the perfect race in the greatest race of all — and beat all the boys.

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Originally published as Melbourne Cup 2015: Michelle Payne’s determination to defy odds sees her claim incredible win