Melbourne Cup 2019: How a bunch of blokes delivered an Aussie Cup
The story of how a group of ordinary Aussies won racing’s greatest prize.
A Noosa bloke in construction who breeds horses for a hobby, a couple of draughtsmen in Melbourne’s southeast, a high school teacher and deputy mayor of Gympie, and the retired NSW backbencher.
This is not a story of princes or sheiks, or Irish raiders or Japanese stayers. It’s the story of how a bunch of ordinary Aussies won racing’s greatest prize with a horse trained in Horsham, Victoria.
It is a story of a jockey who rode the race of his life to win the Melbourne Cup from a wide barrier on a horse in the care of a trainer who once went to court to clear his name. And owners from country towns and far-flung suburbs away from the glitz and glamour who took home the gold cup.
Vow And Declare’s win on Tuesday at Flemington was also an act of defiance, an aberration in all likelihood, but the sort of win they said wouldn’t happen any more. The last Australian runner to win was Shocking in 2009.
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The international raiders come for a share of the $8m prize pool in seemingly greater numbers every spring, but this year a horse its hobby breeder — that bloke in construction, who builds schools, petrol stations and supermarkets — couldn’t sell for $60,000 at a 2017 yearling sale beat the million-dollar foreigners.
Owners like Sheik Mohammed, Prince Khalid, Lloyd Williams. Trainers like David Hayes, Chris Waller and Aiden O’Brien. They were all beaten on a sunny spring day at Flemington, overshadowed in part by the lowest crowd since 1995 at 81,408, and betting turnover being down. “To do it with a horse bred in Australia is a great thrill,” said trainer Danny O’Brien, who fought cobalt charges for three years and eventually cleared his name after Supreme Court action last year. “It is becoming more elusive … but today shows it can still be done.”
O’Brien said “it was a superb ride” when asked how he had rated the performance of jockey Craig Williams, who won the Cup at his 16th attempt to complete a grand slam of victories, given he has already won two Caulfield Cups and two Cox Plates, and even a Golden Slipper.
Williams could also barely contain his delight. “To be associated with an Australian-bred horse when the race is so international, it is … wow. I don’t know what surreal means, I haven’t looked it up in the dictionary. But I know everyone keeps using it.”
There has never been a more deserved dinner! @FlemingtonVRC @Racing @CWilliamsJockey pic.twitter.com/KDWdt46qYt
— Danny O'Brien (@DOBrienRacing) November 5, 2019
The jockey’s father, Allan, would joke in the mounting yard after the race that there was probably no chance his son would get a start in racing these days, given he had been a “fat little kid”.
But a proud dad, a former jockey turned trainer, would also beam with pride about Williams’s tactic to get Vow And Declare right on the pace in the early stages and survive a surge from Master Of Reality, which was later relegated to fourth on appeal to have Prince Of Arran officially second and Il Paradiso third.
“It was a great ride; he took it up early and gave the horse every possible chance. He has worked really hard all his life, and good on him. It was a great thrill.”
Mother Glenda, with a tear in her eye, harked back to her son’s lack of luck in 2011 when he was suspended days before the Cup and lost his ride on the eventual winner — “he should have won on Dunaden … and he was robbed”.
Wife Larysa confessed to not being able to watch the race. “I was too nervous. After everyone started to yell, I knew something was happening.”
Vow And Declare — named by breeder Paul Lanskey, owner of Lanskey Constructions, because apparently his father would come home from the pub and “vow and declare” to his wife that he’d only had a few beers — was at first thought to be more of a sprinter.
Blood tests would confirm it had more of a stayer profile, not that many were interested when Lanskey was “hoping for something in the order of $90,000”, having put a reserve of $60,000 on it at that 2017 Inglis Classic Yearling Sale. It got no bids.
However, Geoff Corrigan, a one-time Labor state MP from Camden in NSW who worked at the Sydney Opera House when it opened in 1973 and had come into a bit of money from a good investment, had fallen in love with the horse. He offered $35,000 for a majority share and suggested they get the same ownership group they had been in with Danny O’Brien for Lycurgus.
That group includes Melburnians Stuart Livingstone and Stuart Knipe, long-time draughtsman colleagues. Would Livingstone be at his Digimech mechanical drafting business in Mulgrave on Wednesday? “Absolutely not. (We’re) probably back on Monday now,” he said in the mounting yard.
About 10 per cent of the horse is owned by various Gympie types, some of whom are relatives of Lanskey, as well as a teacher and deputy mayor Bob Leitch. “The Gympie people are first-time owners,” chuckled Corrigan. “They think this is normal.”
He hailed Vow And Declare’s win as a victory against “this almost fawning supplication to foreign horses”. If the horse had been called Paris, for example, he said, and had a similar lead-in form, it would have been rated higher “but because it is Australian, everyone has their doubts”.
Now he dreams of taking the horse, still only a four-year-old, to Royal Ascot where he and his owners might don top hats and see the Queen. It would be a tale of a young Australian heading for the lights of London. In that way, it would be a typical Australian tale. Which came after an old-fashioned Aussie win on Tuesday.
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