Michelle Payne: Cup queen who changed the track
IT was supposed to be another day and another ride for Michelle Payne. It was anything but, writes Patrick Carlyon.
Spring Racing Carnival
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SHE arrived just before 2pm, a quiet smile playing under oversized sunglasses. She swung a designer handbag and boasted a silver necklace that sparkled almost as brightly as the blue eyes she later revealed for the cameras.
Here was a vision of Jackie Kennedy, down to the helicopter arrival in the middle of the track.
Certainly the crowd thought so: it surged to the celebrity guest like metal filings to a magnet. The royal tour had landed in Kyneton.
A guard of honour formed under the soaring oaks that lend Kyneton racecourse its country charms.
This course is usually a sanctuary to timeless rhythms, to bookie tote boards, hedged fences and lawn umbrellas. Yesterday, Kyneton was about roars of approval and getting a selfie with the hottest property in the southern hemisphere.
It was supposed to be another day and another ride for Michelle Payne.
She tried to set herself to the Kyneton Cup and her short-priced mount Akzar. A jockey’s track walk, her habit before every race meeting, has never been so heartily celebrated.
“Humble, almost embarrassed,” was how the oncourse announcer described her response to the adulation.
Her mount finished fourth, despite Payne giving it every chance on the inside rail.
What happened next was more telling. Most of the media cameras after the race fixed on a jockey who finished out of the placings, a jockey who could not stop smiling.
By then, Payne had attended to a never-ending stream of media duties, so many that the ride itself seemed to be squeezed in after media commitments with Hughesie and Kate, and 5AA, and the Herald Sun.
These followed lunch at Crown Casino, and a round of media interviews on the breakfast circuit.
Fortunately, Payne had planned ahead, limiting her celebrations on Tuesday night to two weak vodkas and soda. She even sneaked a few hours’ sleep.
She was enjoying it, she said repeatedly, as she lounged on the bed in the medical room in the bowels of a tiny grandstand. Though it still seemed unreal, she admitted.
She grasped that she was no longer the jockey who prided a third place in the Doncaster Mile as her greatest career highlight. She was an unexpected hero of folklore and a feminist icon. Yet she still wasn’t sure when the magnitude of her feat would sink in.
She was plainly grappling with the status yesterday. Despite telling tales, on request, about the injustices of being a woman in a man’s sport — the young jockeys who had treated her as “inferior”, the owner who declared that racecourses should be “like the 1920s”, when women were banned — Payne did not want to harp on criticisms.
Rather, and this is where she used her smile to fullest effect, she wanted to lift opportunities for other women in the sport.
It had been just like any other race — she said the same prayer in the barrier, as always, to her departed mother and sister, though she did give Bart Cummings, a big supporter who happened to train a dozen Cup winners, a thought.
Perhaps it was there when the Melbourne Cup became like no other race, and grew into an “out-of-body experience”.
As the crowds parted for Payne’s arrival yesterday, her brother Stevie, the strapper of Prince Of Penzance, was getting hugs and handshakes.
That grin — first glimpsed at Saturday’s Cup barrier draw — was as pasted on as his sister’s.
He had “played up” last night, he explained, had a couple of drinks and stayed out until 11.30.
Another of winning trainer Darren Weir’s jockeys, Brad Rawiller, meanwhile explained how the horses loved Stevie Payne’s presence.
He calmed them, Rawiller explained, in part because he felt no fear of them.
Rawiller also spoke of Payne’s optimism and self-belief. She received many times more the criticism of other jockeys, he said, and it was desperately unfair.
Rawiller seemed to be describing a sport riven with sexism.
“You have this preoccupation that males might be stronger,” he said.
“At the end of the day, it’s utter bulls---.”
Payne herself spoke of her brother’s love of horses. The pair of them watched the movie Phar Lap “500 times” as kids.
Her goal, once the Spring Carnival was over, was to get her trainer’s licence next August. She and Stevie part- own property next door to her father’s property near Ballarat.
In her fairytale, the one that first collided with reality on Tuesday, she will own, train and ride her own horses. And Stevie will look after them.
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