SIMILARITIES between myself and Willie Mullins are unfortunately few and far between, but our interest and appetite for the Melbourne Cup were both ignited as kids.
It was reading about the exploits of the legendary Phar Lap that got the champion trainer hooked on Australia’s greatest race, while hat-trick heroine Makybe Diva did it for me, as well as hearing about the ground-breaking achievements of Dermot Weld.
There has always been an air of magic about the Cup. From a young age, an early alarm to watch the two-mile extravaganza has been set for the first Tuesday in November each year, and, in fact, one of the favourite Christmas presents I ever received as a child was a copy of the Playstation 2 game ‘Melbourne Cup Challenge’.
Having played that Australian racing simulation game to death as a child, there was something a bit surreal about walking the course solo for the first time at Flemington on the night before this year’s Cup. All was quiet. Well, all bar the sound of the watering system sprinkling away in front of the empty grandstands. Returning a day later to a sell-out crowd of 91,168 lived up to all the hype.
We’ve all heard the talk of the Melbourne Cup being ‘the race that stops a nation’, but to fully appreciate the magnitude of the occasion, you really need to experience it first hand.
Of course, there are still the anti-racing figures who oppose the meeting, like we experience at home with fixtures like the Grand National, but it’s striking to find how many people here in the general public have a genuine awareness of the sport’s participants.
Household names
First hand, I had a bus driver, waitress and border security officer each bring up the name ‘Vauban’ when they heard I was here for the Cup, while hotel staff, baristas and a Great Ocean Road tour guide were all eager to talk Via Sistina’s stunning Cox Plate success or their fandom around Pride Of Jenni.
For all that Ireland is intrinsically linked with horses, I found the connection between people on the ground and star flat performers to be a hell of a lot stronger in Australia. Attendance figures for flat meetings in Ireland - both major and small meetings - support that theory.
A sure factor in that is the level of media coverage racing receives down under. In terms of mainstream national media, it’s a different world to the shrinking column inches that many of our national papers give to racing. Our Group 1 races can be footnotes, two-or-three-line references, in some of the Sunday papers. When it comes to Australia’s premier contests, it can make the front and back portions of the papers.
An example of this blew me away in the Sunday Age paper last weekend. As well as having a picture of jockey Jamie Kah on the front after winning the Penfolds Victoria Derby a day earlier, and a four-page pullout form guide to Tuesday’s action in the centre, pages six and seven of the overall paper were dedicated to the Lexus-backed Melbourne Cup.
Most eyecatching, though, was the presence of a feature piece spread across the two pages that focused on Teofilo and the fact no sire had produced more Cup winners than him in modern times. Journalist Rob Harris travelled to Kildangan Stud to profile the Darley stallion and went into some detail about the sire’s exploits down under, his characteristics and popularity among breeders. Seeing a piece like that in the sports section of a mainstream Irish paper would be phenomenal. Finding it on page six of a Sunday paper proper was incredible.
Age demographic
What strikes you when walking around the facilities at Flemington, both on Cup and Derby day, is the number of young people who are racing. There were reported increases in the sub-30 age bracket, with a total crowd of 81,162, on the Saturday and close to 10,000 more on the Tuesday.
You get the sense this is a social event they feel they should be at, and the atmosphere was rocking. Likewise, footage from a sold-out 49,117 at Royal Randwick belting out Sweet Caroline a couple of weeks earlier is well worth a watch online.
It must be said that good weather, which we can never be truly guaranteed in Ireland, and a strong level of finance to promote these meetings is massively beneficial. However, it’s not just a case of throwing money at an event and getting a result. Like the best racehorse trainers/owners and sporting directors in football, it’s how you use your resources. They are clearly getting a lot of things right here.
It looked like Mullins and his team had done a lot right with Vauban in the lead-up to this year’s Cup. Plenty had changed in the preparation from 12 months ago when disappointing in the race. Having watched him and stablemate Absurde at the saddling boxes for much of the final hour before the off, the camp felt he looked much more alert than was the case a year earlier. Susannah Ricci’s stayer was doing his best to bite those closest to him, seen as a positive sign with his usual behaviour.
Shock result
Unfortunately, it was apparent from a long way from home - William Buick felt from at least halfway - that Vauban was not running the sort of race that has seen him mix it with Europe’s elite stayers all summer in Ireland and Britain. In contrast, Absurde performed with major credit in finishing fifth for the H O S Syndicate - weaving through traffic like he was on an obstacle course from a long way back. What a horse he is for connections. It seems he could easily return to Flemington next year.
Coming from the same parish, from well off the pace, were Knight’s Choice and Robbie Dolan. They never saw complete daylight until hitting the front deep, deep inside the final half furlong, and to say this was a shock victory doesn’t come close to doing the feat justice. I even overheard one of the local press mention that he would “give up punting for life” if the longshot managed to win. Hands up. I’ll admit to falling into a similar trap of dismissing Knight’s Choice. After all, he was by a speedball sprinter and out of a dam started out over five furlongs. Stamina looked a massive worry over two miles.
My initial plan to interview Kildare town native Dolan upon seeing he’d been confirmed for the ride was shelved once spotting odds of 150/1. ‘Don’t waste his time talking up a no-hoper before his first Cup ride’ was the thinking. Some judge, I am.
Knight’s Choice has an unorthodox pedigree for winning a Melbourne Cup and Dolan isn’t exactly your orthodox jockey either.
Despite already winning two Group 1s since making the journey to Australia eight years ago, he arguably gained greater international recognition for his musical talents. Dolan famously made it to the final 12 of The Voice Australia in 2022. He’s very much an original character.
What’s more, not many Irish riders turn up to the track with blonde highlighted tips in their hair, sporting a touch of a moustache. Neither do they tend to ride with their silk sleeves rolled up close to the elbow, arm tattoo showing. They also don’t usually come across their Melbourne Cup mounts by meeting their trainer while singing on a P&O Melbourne Cup-themed cruise ship two years in advance. Dolan did just that. Dolan won the 2024 Melbourne Cup.
It took guts to leave home back in 2016 and compete on a different continent with just three winners to his name on home soil, but the 28-year-old deserves serious credit for standing on his own two feet in an industry crying out for characters. He was undoubtedly the story of the race.
Smashing ride
While his singing made for an engaging angle for the public and press to connect with around the world, it almost got slightly lost in the chaos of it all that Dolan delivered an absolute peach on the 90/1 winner. He never missed a beat in one of the world’s biggest races. The impressive study he undertook in watching the previous 40 Melbourne Cups in the lead-up to his ride on the longshot reaped major dividends.
It’s clear that Dolan has never forgotten where he came from either, sporting the green elastic band around his goggles. In all the hustle and bustle of being mobbed with media requests (“I’m getting interviewed by so many people, it’s like I’m signing for Real Madrid”), it was certainly appreciated that he delayed other duties to make time for speaking to The Irish Field, insisting he wanted to look after those from home. A sound touch in a frantic moment.
??? "I moved here eight years ago with a schoolbag on my back... Now I've won a Melbourne Cup!"
A proud family moment as Kildare native Robbie Dolan (@ZRKD) is joined by his dad Bobby after a remarkable victory down under ????@Mark_Boylan1 caught up with the pair @FlemingtonVRC. pic.twitter.com/A6CiChfA1W
Even for figures as big in the sport as Mullins and Ricci, you get the sense that capturing the Cup would be a career-defining moment for them internationally.
Sensationally, that moment has just arrived for Robbie Dolan. Who knows, perhaps his genuinely remarkable victory might just get the next generation of Cup followers hooked.