The Melbourne Cup tale about how champion Makybe Diva became a legend
IT was Melbourne Cup Eve, 2005, and two men closely associated with Makybe Diva’s bid for a third Melbourne Cup success were plotting her pathway to racing immortality.
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IT was Melbourne Cup Eve, 2005, and two men closely associated with Makybe Diva’s bid for a third Melbourne Cup success were plotting her pathway to racing immortality.
Tony Santic was nervous. The expectation of a nation rested uneasily with the mare’s owner. He not only owned the country’s most famous horse, he could also lay claim to one of the most recognisable mullets in Australia.
Glen Boss was seeking to allay Santic’s anxieties in a chat that still gives him goosebumps now, 10 years on. He felt like a kid on the night before Christmas — expectant and eager for the hours to pass as quickly as he knew his horse would run the next day.
Boss recalled: “I put my hand on (Santic’s) shoulder and said ‘Do you know what Tony, I feel like we are on a runaway locomotive right now’.
“I said, ‘Mate, it can’t be stopped. I can’t stop this; we can’t stop this. She will win tomorrow. He just looked at me and said ‘Wow’.”
Just under 20 hours later, the runaway locomotive unleashed her trademark withering burst up the famous Flemington straight to rewrite the history of a race that stops a nation and interests the world.
Boss is still emotional about how Makybe Diva “exploded” in the straight to win a record-breaking third Melbourne Cup.
“I got to about the 400m mark and there was a fair bit in front of me,” he said. “I could sense a quarter of a run coming to my right ... and she was quite responsive, saying ‘When are we going, when are we going?’
“I (was) saying, ‘Not yet, not yet’. She had such fluid movement. It’s like water going through your hands. You could just move your hands in the slightest degree and, bang, all of a sudden, you are there.” The rest was history.
THE OWNER
THE mullet is gone, the mask has been put away with the memorabilia, but the memories will never fade for Tony Santic.
For the multi-millionaire businessman and owner of the only horse to win three Cups, much has changed since that fabled first Tuesday in November, 2005.
He has long since been divorced from his then wife, Christine, who had been a very visible part of the Diva storyline. He has made a new life with his new wife, Deslee, and in raising a new family with her.
But the intensely-private Santic, who would not be interviewed for this story, told a Racing Victoria tribute recently that he knows his story will forever be entwined with his record-breaking horse.
“The whole of Australia was a part of her over the last two or three years (of her racing career),” Santic, 63, said. “She is a special horse. Everyone loves their animals or whatever, but she is something out of the box.”
Santic said there was a sense that Makybe Diva’s third Cup win was “just meant to be ... when she hit the front, you just heard the crowd go crazy, and it just gave me goosebumps.”
Santic and trainer Lee Freedman feared briefly after her stunning Cox Plate win that she may have come to the end of her campaign.
“Things weren’t right,” he said. “That was when we sort of put a hold on everything. It wasn’t until five days later that Lee said to Glen to come down and give her a bit of a gallop because she had put on a lot of weight and she was back to her normal self.”
Santic immediately decided to retire the mare following her 2005 Cup victory.
THE TRAINER
IT’S one of the most famous quotes in the century-and-a-half of the Melbourne Cup, and Lee Freedman settled on it the night before Makybe Diva raced into history.
Freedman spent Cup Eve crafting what he might say if she won, as he expected. And when she did, the pragmatist turned poet for a moment, saying: “Go find the smallest child on this course, and there will be the only example of a person who will live long enough to see that again.”
Freedman recalled: “I knew if it did happen, it was going to be such a big moment.
“Using adjectives to describe horses is pretty hackneyed ... wonderful, marvellous, fantastic, champion. That would all fall pretty flat. So I tried to put it into some sort of historical perspective.
“I don’t know of too many horses who made the front page of a major city daily (newspaper) as she did on the morning of her third Melbourne Cup. The event was in the national psyche.”
“That little child is now probably doing his money on the punt now,’’ quipped Freedman.
“But it really is becoming increasing difficult to win this race. To get a horse so dominant to fight off the imported horses and win three in a row ... we won’t be seeing that.’’
“I had it in the back of my mind. I felt there was no point saying all the usual platitudes about horses because it did not really match the moment,” he said this week.
“I tried to put it into some sort of historical context. I still get it quoted to me. You walk into a pub and a bloke will say “where is that young kid now?’’
The 59-year-old described Makybe Diva as a total professional, “beige in her nature ... people had her as this exciting mare, but around the stables and in her training, she was no fuss. She just got on with the work.”
He didn’t believe the champion mare had pulled up well enough from her Cox Plate win to push onto her third Cup, but a track gallop and a glowing report from Glen Boss thankfully changed his perceptions.
“There’s a lot of time when jockeys tell you thing, and I don’t really notice, because you don’t respect their opinion,” he said. “But in terms of that mare, and that period of her life, (Boss) was probably the one person out of myself that knew the most about that horse. So I respected his opinion, and when he gave it the thumbs up, that was all I needed to hear.”
THE JOCKEY
GLEN Boss hasn’t seen Makybe Diva for a number of years, but he still lives with her every day.
Anyone he speaks to, whether they know anything about racing or not, naturally associates him with her. Even this week, when he was a speaker at an IT forum at Randwick, with people from all over the world, those listening to him were captivated by the link between the jockey and the mare.
“Everyone still wants to talk about her,” he told the Sunday Herald Sun. “You ask them to name two or three other winners of the Cup and they couldn’t do it. But they all know Makybe Diva.
“It’s a story that had so many little parts to it, and she was at the centre of it all. It was all her. To see that plain-looking skinny mare develop into what she became was amazing.”
Boss, 46, is articulate and generous with his time, knowing his part in the Makybe Diva story has not only played an enormous part in his life, but that the public feels a certain ownership as well.
He can’t remember the last time he spoke to Santic. “Since he got remarried, it made it difficult to see him,” Boss said. “But that’s OK, people move on, that’s life.”
“But (Santic’s ex-wife) Christine is like my mother. She is fantastic. She still lives in Port Lincoln and every time she comes to Melbourne, we catch up. We’re still very close.”
Boss’ pursuit of another Cup win over the past decade has meant he has had to kept some of his Makybe memories under lock and key in his mind.
They won’t truly open up until when he finally retires from the profession he still loves.
“To be brutally honest, I’ve had to lock a bit of that up and keep it inside,” he said. “Three Cups in a row, I won’t ever achieve that again. What we achieved, what she achieved took us into the stratosphere.”
THE MARE
MAKYBE Diva, now 17, is still somewhat of a tourist attraction at her owner Tony Santic’s property in Victoria.
Santic named the property Makybe in honour of his champion and in recent years has scaled back his breeding operation from 200 horses to a more boutique 25, of which Makybe Diva is the obvious pride and joy.
Just recently the farm hosted a bus tour of ladies from Port Lincoln who wanted to meet one of Australian racing’s true legends.
This year Makybe Diva has become a fully-fledged ‘Cougar’, being covered by champion sprinter Brazen Beau — 13 years her junior!
The winner of $14.5 million in prizemoney has continued to give handsome returns to Santic through the sales ring, with her four yearlings to sell at public auction accumulating a sales total of more than $3.3 million. But like many champion mares, Makybe Diva has not produced a son or daughter that possesses anything like her level of ability.
Her first foal made $1.5 million and was aptly named Rockstardom. In 12 starts, Rockstardom won twice, at Bendigo and Cranbourne and accumulated earnings of $26,115.
To date, he’s been the best of Makybe Diva’s four progeny to race.
La Dolce Diva came a year later and made $1.2 million at the sales. She failed to win in four starts and Santic bought her back as a broodmare prospect for $300,000.
Next came Coaster, who was sent to Europe and had one start in France, running last and beaten 31 lengths.
Taqneen was a $360,000 yearling and to date has failed to win in seven starts for earnings of $3,045. Her 2012 foal, Surrey, fetched $275,000 at sale but hasn’t made it to the races.
Makybe Diva went to the stallion regarded as the best in the world, Galileo, in her first year and since then has produced progeny by outstanding sires like Encosta De Lago, Lonhro and High Chaparral.
In the past two years, she has produced fillies by All Too Hard and Starspangledbanner.
That’s a good thing. Quite often the ‘champion gene’ skips a generation and it’s the grandchildren that carry on the tradition.
With Nathan Exelby
THE WORKMATES WHO GAVE HER THE NAME
THERE’S a sign on the door of the office shared by Kylie Bascomb and Dianne Moseby at Navigator College in Port Lincoln — it reads “The Diva Den”.
That says so much about their connection, and shared history.
Fifteen years ago, the pair, along with Maureen Dellar, Belinda Grocke and Vanessa Parthenis, sat around the board room table of Santic’s Tony’s Tuna offices and used the first two letters of their first names to create a name for a filly owned by their boss. The result was Makybe Diva.
Bascomb will never forget her 14 years working with Tony’s Tuna, nor the journey those five women had in following the champion mare owned by Santic. And she can’t believe that 10 years on she and Dianne share an office in their jobs at the Port Lincoln school.
“It was a great experience for us all,” she said. “We all have some fantastic memories of working for the business, and the success that Makybe had.
“I can remember sitting around the board room table and throwing the letters around and jotting them all down. It was an amazing time and that sort of thing never leaves your memory.
“I remember Tony making comments saying ‘This is just so big’. I remember thinking we weren’t fully prepared for what was going to unfold.”
She was lucky enough to attend the first two Cups, but was pregnant with her second child when the third Cup was run.
One of the things she has on her “bucket list” is taking her children, John (10), and Kia (9), to see the mighty mare in the future. “I would dearly love to see her again, I haven’t seen her since the Cups,” she said.
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