Patrick Carlyon: 2021 Melbourne cup will be like no other

This year’s race stands as a belated pay-off for unprecedented suffering, a signpost that Melbourne has wriggled free of the foreboding.

After winning a race on Saturday, jockey Damien Oliver tossed his race glasses into the Flemington crowd on his return to scale.

The happy recipient donned them and galloped across the empty lawn like a jockey whipping a horse.

Soon afterwards, Oliver spoke of his pleasure.

Any crowd is better than no crowd, he said.

Today’s Cup will feature twice the guests of Saturday’s Derby, the unofficial kick-off for a city’s rebirth from Covid, when small groups dined under umbrellas on the lawn and nodded to the rules.

But Flemington will once again feel like a major Melbourne moment freeze-dried by necessity.

The usual Cup Day nightclub/picnic/boys’ and girls’ day will be reimagined as a garden party.

The crowd will be fewer than one-ninth of the number who watched filly Sister Olive upset the favourites in the 1921 Cup a century ago and make her bookie owner Frederick Norman extremely wealthy.

Damien Oliver at Derby Day. Picture: Michael Klein.

But it will be 10,000 more than last year, when 17 spectators, essential workers all, stood at the winning post before the race, and winning jockey Jye McNeil was encouraged to wave in response to phantom applause after the race.

McNeil wants to repeat the performance today on the same horse, Twilight Payment, to replicate the “complete happiness” of his life-changing moment.

“I’ve experienced the atmosphere but obviously not when I’ve won it,” he said of Cup day. “It would be good to be cheered home and hopefully they can give him a cheer for last year as well.”

Fellow jockey Craig Williams, who is riding in his 19th Cup, described the crowd element.

“For horses, no doubt, you’ve got that extra noise which they haven’t been used to for the past 18 months,” he said.

“For jockeys, if you are victorious at Flemington ... there’s nothing better than to come back to … that great jovial crowd. But if you are getting beaten on favourites, that’s the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s a long way coming back ... if you are being booed and hissed.”

In the forced absence of celebrity central, and the muted homage to fashion and frolics, Flemington will be all about the horses.

The imports are fewer, after Covid conspired with stricter horse safety requirements to stem the usual Cup invasion.

Jye McNeil is hoping for a win in front of crowds after wining the 2020 Melbourne Cup. Picture: David Caird

Racing authorities have responded to disquiet about horse deaths, which has muddled the once blind embrace of the race. The Melbourne Cup has become the most dangerous race of the year.

Six Cup horse deaths, all foreigners, in seven years compares with the wider rate of one horse death in every 2500 races.

Bone scans and vet reports are now as much of the Cup build-up as the barrier draw and the bloom of the on-course Grimaldi roses.

Incentivise will start as the shortest-priced favourite since Phar Lap. Pundits have reduced the main chances to a kind of match race – Incentivise versus the world. This Cup field is not as deep as some. The number of horses that cannot realistically win the race almost matches the number that can.

A win, for trainer Peter Moody and all the mug punters who plonk a few dollars on Incentivise, would borrow from Phar Lap’s lifting of morale in 1930, and serve as an unofficial turning point of merriment after gloom.

Incentivise, a once slow horse before winning his past nine races, could endure as a local fairytale to be told alongside the Cummings or Oliver wins of folklore.

But he is no certainty. The fly-in, fly-out international horse has been a constant plunderer of our Cup since the 1990s.

Incentivise ridden by Brett Prebble wins the Caulfield Cup. Picutre Getty Images)

Will Spanish Mission, after two failed vet checks, confirm his record as one of the world’s best stayers? His rider is Williams, who wrote stories about winning the Cup as a schoolkid. After riding the horse on Sunday, Williams felt positively “bullish”.

Flemington today will not resemble what a racing great once wrote of the then 150-year-old institution: “In the dark, six hours after the race has been won, the rose gardens and hedges of Flemington still give off giggles and groans as one walks past. One steps around a slingback shoe, totem of the fallen and the footsore, abandoned on the grass. It doesn’t go like this on any other day of the year, or anywhere else in the world.”

Indeed, this Cup will be unlike any other before Covid. It has to be. Safety has trumped fun. The historical excesses of the Cup party – when a “prim town” is let “out of the closet” – will have to wait another year.

But this Cup, like all, doubles as a barometer of a changing town. It has done so since one in three Melburnians attended the race in post gold-rush colonial days. Today’s race stands as a belated pay-off for unprecedented suffering, a signpost that Melbourne has wriggled free of the foreboding.

Every Cup can be reduced to a score of conflicting stories, thrown together for three and a bit minutes in a cavalry charge of poise, patience and panic.

This Cup will be no different.

Originally published as Patrick Carlyon: 2021 Melbourne cup will be like no other