Andrew Rule: Trying to pick a Melbourne Cup winner? Think like a detective and eliminate suspects
It’s the race that stops a nation’s form gurus in their tracks — because backing a Melbourne Cup winner defies statistics and logic, as last year’s 90-1 result shows. So how do you pick a star horse?
Racing is about horses and people. Everything else, the industry, the gambling revenue and the social whirl of carnivals like Flemington’s this week, runs second to the ancient connection between man and beast.
Without people, what’s a racehorse? Just a big animal running in circles between being fed, watered and groomed. If racing has any deeper meaning, it is people’s love of the spectacle of the running horse and the thunder of hooves.
From the stables of ancient Greece and Rome to the ones at Flemington and Randwick, not to mention Newmarket and Ballydoyle, some things haven’t changed much in a couple of thousand years.
Old horse people still cherish young, untried gallopers – the ones they handled a lifetime ago and the one stepping off the float tomorrow. A disease, they say, curable only by death.
It runs in families. When Tommy Smith was nine years old, he would have ducked school on Cup Day, 1925.
The kid missed a lot of school in any case. His father was a hard man, working the boy like one of his draught horses digging dams in the Riverina back-country. But if there was ever a time to knock off early it was that day, to get to town to hear the first live radio call of Australia’s greatest race.
Windbag won, setting a record of 3min 22.75sec, comparable with Cup times later in the 20th Century, and incomparably faster than in the “straightback” era that had ended back before World War I. He was ridden by a young jockey, Jim Munro, launching a brilliant career.
Between the cinema newsreels of big races, which were screened the next day around the nation, and the great radio innovation, the 1925 Cup was in many ways the start of the modern racing era that young Smith would grow up to dominate.
“T.J.” prepared two Melbourne Cup winners – Toparoa in 1955 and Just A Dash in 1981 – in an astonishing career in which he trained thousands of horses. He would eventually hand it to his daughter, Gai. Not only has she trained a Cup winner, Fiorente in 2013, but she and co-trainer Adrian Bott have a good runner on Tuesday in Vauban – and a seeming champion in the paddock in Sir Delius, likely to loom large next year after being scratched last week.
But the Smith dynasty might never have got its start without Windbag winning in 1925. Schoolboy Tommy could hardly have guessed the effect it would have on his life.
Windbag, well-bred and a better galloper than many Cup winners before him, stood as a stallion at A.G. Hunter’s stud near Seymour, where he’s buried under a huge granite headstone. One of the 212 winners he sired was Bragger, the horse that turned Tommy Smith, the kid from nowhere, from a failed jockey into a famed trainer.
Bragger was an outlaw from the back paddocks of Eulomo Station near Cootamundra, where Smith was working in 1941 while recovering from a broken hip.
The station owners talked of shooting the rogue four-year-old because he seemed unbreakable and dangerous. But Smith sensed something in that untamed spirit.
Bragger became the foundation story of the Smith legend. With the help of a rodeo rider, the reformed buckjumper won 13 races. Smith backed him fearlessly and was never broke again, setting up the stable that would become Tulloch Lodge, headquarters of the training operation led by his daughter Gai Waterhouse.
The scratching of the superb Sir Delius following a compulsory bone scan is a blow for Tulloch Lodge and the horse’s connections.
Every cloud has a silver lining, although the thunderclouds hanging over Flemington over the next couple of days could test that theory. Sir Delius’s absence might disappoint promoters but it brings other horses into focus.
If the big rainstorm arrives late and hits on Cup time at 3pm, it threatens to be like the 1976 race, when Kiwi mudlark Van Der Hum ploughed through rain so heavy that the caller couldn’t see the horses’ colours for much of the race.
But if most of the predicted rain holds off until after the Cup, it means a soft track rather than a bog. And that should suit most of the northern hemisphere horses, whose presence has transformed our once parochial Australasian affair into the global heavyweight staying championship that blossomed after Ireland’s Vintage Crop broke through in 1993.
The raiders and “migrants” who followed Vintage Crop have set the pace this century. Even the Cup’s greatest success, triple winner Makybe Diva, wasn’t homegrown. She was foaled in England and raised there for 18 months before arriving here in time to be broken in.
The Diva’s historic hat-trick skews the statistics: in truth, relatively few mares run in the Cup, let alone win it. It’s worth remembering that when chasing the winner in a huge field with tangled form lines from across the world.
It’s the race that stops a nation’s form gurus in their tracks because they aren’t much better picking Cup winners than the rest of us.
Experts are experts but the Cup defies analysis and logic, bar the hindsight variety. Last year’s 90-1 result shows anything can happen. Meanwhile, we mugs need a machete to hack through the jungle of data and cut the field to a manageable size.
There’s a case to do what detectives do: eliminate suspects.
Start with the favourite. Just now, that’s the Irish-trained Al Riffa (to be ridden by big-occasion rider Mark Zahra) but that’s a risk to be taken. Not because Al Riffa doesn’t deserve to be favourite but because 23 horses will get in his way.
Over 164 years about one in five favourites have won – but only two in the past 20 years, none in the past 12.
With the favourite redacted, switch tactics and cull everything at odds of longer than 40-1.
True, in the last decade that method would have cost two longshot winners: Michelle Payne’s history-making Prince Of Penzance in 2015 and last year’s winner, Knight’s Choice. But the other eight out of 10 results indicate that most Cup winners are neither hot favourites nor totally friendless in the market.
Statistics are tricky but they suggest that most Cups are won by four, five and six year olds, with seven year olds breaking through occasionally and winners rarely coming from extra wide barriers.
Keen students should note the six-month discrepancy between northern-hemisphere horses and locals. An import ruled a “five-year-old” by Australasian time is really only four and a half, meaning Makybe Diva was six years and seven months old (not a true seven-year-old) when she won her third Cup.
Marginal? Yes. But if age counts against stayers that are seven or eight, then imports lumped in the same bracket with locals have a slight edge.
This helps make the case for Onesmoothoperator, the veteran Yorkshire raider who won last year’s Geelong Cup like a beauty and last week’s Moonee Valley Cup in even better style.
The Yorkshire ripper might be eight in the racebook but he’s really seven years and seven months – and everyone knows seven is such a lucky number that many owners give horses seven-letter names. Like Windbag, for instance. Or Meydaan, the son of Frankel to be ridden by the superstar James McDonald.
Facts and figures are for form aficionados whereas a reporter’s instinct is to barrack for the best stories.
Country boy Harry Coffey picking up the ride on Onesmoothoperator (after big-timer Zahra opted for the favourite) is exactly such a story. But the quiet hero of Swan Hill, who has stared down the life sentence of cystic fibrosis, isn’t the only good yarn going around.
Paul Preusker towed Surprise Baby down from the Wimmera in 2019 and was gutted when the horse flashed home too late. The bush trainer’s chance of redemption comes with last-start Geelong Cup winner Torranzino, to be ridden by Celine Gaudray.
Five years ago, jockey “coach” Alf Matthews told this reporter that this kid Gaudray was destined for great things. Now’s her chance to prove him right.
That is, of course, if all those once-a-year punters who love a pretty grey don’t spoil it when the dashing Presage Nocturne comes streaming past the way he ran his slashing fourth in the Caulfield Cup.
Back when Banjo Paterson wrote The Man from Snowy River, his contemporary bush poet Will Ogilvie published a popular book of verse named Fair Girls and Gray Horses. A beautiful title and maybe the clue to a box trifecta on Tuesday.
