Grahame Begg wants punters to channel their parochialism and support the Aussies in Tuesday’s Melbourne Cup
The Victorian trainer is saddling up his first Melbourne Cup runner and is hoping the locals can upset the imports.
Grahame Begg has urged Australians to channel their parochialism and put their support behind the local contingent taking on the might of Melbourne Cup favourite Deauville Legend and other internationals in Tuesday’s $8 million race.
Begg will have his first Melbourne Cup runner this year when seven-year-old mare Lunar Flare lines up at Flemington, and he is hopeful she can run a big race.
The mare will be the subject of a vets inspection on raceday morning after presenting lameness in the off fore on Monday.
An outstanding trainer who deliberately keeps a boutique stable of only 30 horses in work at his Mornington base and has an enviable strike-rate of success, Begg couldn’t be more proud of his mare, or his stable for executing a plan to get Lunar Flare into the Cup - the race that her sire Fiorente won back in 2013.
What gives him even more satisfaction is that his mare is a home-grown and home-bred product, which has been a rarity in terms of the Cup for much the past decade and a half.
“It’s great to be able to have a Melbourne Cup runner and more so, a locally-grown product,” Begg told News Corp.
“It’s incredible. Look I have never set out to have one (a Cup runner), but I have never really had the right horse either.”
Until maybe now …
“I just get sick of everyone just writing them (the locals) off. Look, they might not be good enough at times, I don’t know. But gee, let’s get behind them.”
Lunar Flare won the Moonee Valley Cup last year which set in train a plan to contest this year’s Cup.
She won the 2022 Bart Cummings which guaranteed a start in the Cup and she backed it up with a slashing Cup trial when second to Francesco Guardi in the Moonee Valley Gold Cup on Cox Plate Day.
“When she drew a wide gate, we said ‘back you go, you have to have a resting run and conserve your energy and you have to do that on the first Tuesday, too’,” Begg said.
“Her run was brilliant.
“She drops to 51.5 kilos (in the Cup), she has got a winnable weight, put it that way. Whether she has got the class, we will wait and see.
“She has never run the two miles (3200m). But if she can give herself a resting run and get the right ride, things could fall in her favour, even though she is going to need some luck.”
In-form jockey Michael Dee will pilot Lunar Flare in the Melbourne Cup, fresh from adding a Victoria Derby to his Group 1 CV on Manzoice after winning the Caulfield Cup on Durston.
As the son of Hall of Fame trainer Neville Begg, Grahame was always destined to become a horseman, even if it has come with some challenges as a often gruelling vocation.
Neville only had a handful of Cup runners in his legendary training career, and now Grahame will have his first horse to contest the great race, a nice bit of symmetry.
The race that stops a nation first stirred Grahame’s interest as a kid when he used to visit a saddlery that had photo finishes of Melbourne Cups on the wall.
He recalled: “Back in the day, there was an old saddlery in Randwick down near the Inglis sales yards and they used to have cutouts of the Cup photo finishes … I was about seven or eight and there were all these great horses.”
Begg took over his father’s stables in Sydney when he was only 29 when Neville left to train in Hong Kong in 1990. Within a matter of months, he had his first Group 1 winner with Eye Of The Sky in the Doomben Cup.
Over the years he established himself as a multiple Group 1 winning trainer with horses of the ilk of All Silent, Mahaya, Telesto, Our Egyptian Raine, Written Tycoon, Secret Admirer and Bonanova.
But the constant grind of training wore him down to the point where he quit the sport in 2014.
He needed a break, which stretched to 18 months, even though his father was constantly trying to find the right avenue to bring him back to racing.
He says he was cooked and needed “to get off the merry-go-round”.
For a time, he became “house bitch” while his wife Sue went back to work, as he looked to recharge the batteries again.
“My father was so concerned with it. He was always looking for jobs for me. He was like ‘Why don’t you go and train in Goulburn? Or do this or do that,” Begg said.
“I was like ‘when I am ready to go again, I will do it.”
He applied for a licence in Singapore, but it never eventuated, which has since proven a blessing in disguise. Instead, he and Sue chose to move to Victoria, and set up base in Mornington, and he swiftly regained his passion and his hunger to be the best he can be.
“They (Singapore) did me a favour,” he said. “I said, ‘OK, right, we have to relocate and start off with a small number of horses’.”
Then along came a horse his father bred called Written By - known as ‘Nugget’ in the stables - and he provided Begg with his 15th Group 1 win in the 2018 Blue Diamond.
Nugget’s little sister, C’est Magique, almost made it another Group 1 for Begg when she ran second to In Secret in the Coolmore Stud Stakes last Saturday.
“I am loving it now, we’ve only got 30 horses in training and we don’t want any more than that,” he said. “You have your ups and down in racing, but we have had runners in the big races, including the Caulfield Cup and now the Melbourne Cup.”
In recent years Begg has run second in a Caulfield Cup with Nonconformist, with Lunar Flare looming as one of his great success stories, not just by getting her into a Melbourne Cup, but for the amount of work to get her there.
Bred by John Valmorbida and wearing the Taj Rossi colours that John’s father-in-law once used, Lunar Flare started out with Lindsay Park, winning a maiden at Moonee Valley by six lengths before losing form.
“She used to be a leader,” Begg said. “She never came back for her next preparation and she got beaten in a 64 at Benalla and at Cranbourne in a four-horse field.
“They recommended to John to retire her.”
Begg willingly took her and “steadily wound her back … it has been a long process.”
“With a bit of racing and maturity, she has now learnt to relax and switch herself off.
“We’ve got a great staff and we work hard at it. It isn’t easy, but it is very rewarding.”
He understands the importance of internationals in the Melbourne Cup, but likes the balance that has come in the past few years.
“It’s always hard to marry up the form of the internationals,” he said. “In some ways, it is bloody impossible.
“There have been a few disasters with the internationals, (especially) when they all went out with the team riding.
“I think it is a better race now that there are not too many (here).
“It gives the Aussies something to dream about, to dream about having a Cup runner.”
Begg and Team Lunar Flare are about to experience that dream, and they will be doing all in their power to try and turn that into a race to remember.
Originally published as Grahame Begg wants punters to channel their parochialism and support the Aussies in Tuesday’s Melbourne Cup
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