Melbourne Cup Day is Australia's most famous Tuesday. At 3.00pm AEST, on the first Tuesday in November, Australians everywhere stop for one of the world's most famous horse races - the Melbourne Cup.
It is a day when the nation stops whatever it's doing to listen to the race call, or watch the race on TV. Even those who don't usually bet, try their luck with a small wager or entry into a sweep. A sweep is a lottery in which each ticket-holder is matched with a randomly drawn horse and prize money is paid out to the first three places plus a consolation prize' for the horse that runs last.
In Melbourne, Cup Day is a public holiday for the Melbourne metropolitan area, and the highlight of the Spring Racing Carnival. The party atmosphere often means that champagne and canapes huge hats and racetrack fashions overshadow the business of horse racing.
American writer Mark Twain said of a visit to the Melbourne Cup in 1895:
Nowhere in the world have I encountered a festival of people that has such a magnificent appeal to the whole nation. The Cup astonishes me.
Race goers in all their finery under the rose arches of Flemington Racecourse.
The official betting agencies, known everywhere in Australia as the TAB (for Totalisator Agency Board), open early on the first Tuesday of November. While Melbourne Cup Day is a public holiday in the Victorian capital, it is pretty much a day of festivity and a day of punting everywhere in the country.
Throughout Australia, offices, clubs and other organisations hold sweeps (where ticketholders are allocated Cup horses at random for the chance of winning the sweeps prize for each of the first three placegetters) and so almost everyone has a stake in the race.
Those who bet at the TAB or with bookies at racecourses throughout the country may have a stronger financial interest in the outcome of the Melbourne Cup but mostly the average Aussie bets small and hopes for a long-priced win.
Right from opening time, and starting from the previous day even, there is a constant stream of punters coming in a for a flutter on the Melbourne Cup. There's hardly anyone who doesn't place a bet on the Melbourne Cup, and the TAB pool runs into several millions of dollars.
The Melbourne Cup race is over in a few minutes, but TV stations have reruns and postmortems throughout the rest of the afternoon and into the night. Those who win in the office sweep, and at the local TAB, collect their winnings and may be prevailed upon to shout their mates a middy or two at the pub.
Melbourne Cup Day is a day of great excitement and hyperbole, and those who boast of big winnings on the Cup may be like those fishermen who talk of the size of the fish that got away.
The first Melbourne Cup was run in 1861 at Flemington Race Course and was won by Archer, a horse from Nowra, New South Wales. The prize was a gold watch and £170. It has run every year since.
Even through wars and depression , the Melbourne Cup racing carnival has been one of the stayers of Australian cultural experience. Phar Lap became the darling of Australian race crowds during the Great Depression of the 1930s - winning all four days of the 1930 Flemington Spring Carnival including the Melbourne Cup carrying 62.5 kg.
Phar Lap
Phar Lap is perhaps Australia's most famous racehorse. Foaled in New Zealand in 1926 by Night Raid out of Entreaty he grew to 17 hands. Over his career he won more than £65,000 in prize money and won 37 of his 51 starts. From September 1929 he was the favourite in all but one of his races.
Phar Lap is the only horse to have started favourite in three successive Melbourne Cups. He came third in 1929, won the race in 1930 and ran eighth in 1931.
The jockey who rode Phar Lap to victory in 1930 was Jimmy Pike . Pike was born in New South Wales in 1892 and did his apprenticeship in South Australia. He is best known for his partnership with Phar Lap on whom he won 27 races from 30 rides. Pike also won two Caulfield Cups, six VRC Derbies (four of these in a row) and two Cox Plates, and was so renowned as a jockey that even to this day, racing experts and punters often say of a jockey that he 'rode it like J. Pike'.
In 1932 Phar Lap was sent to Mexico for the Agua Caliente Handicap, the world's richest race at the time. Sixteen days later he died in San Francisco in suspicious circumstances, some believing he was poisoned. The debate about how Phar Lap died continues today. After his death his bones were donated to Dominion Museum in New Zealand (now the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa ), his hide was mounted and put on display at the Museum of Victoria , and Phar Lap's big heart resides at the National Museum of Australia .
Makybe Diva
In 2005, Makybe Diva made history by being the first horse to win the Melbourne Cup three times, winning consecutive races in 2003, 2004 and 2005. Jockey Glen Boss rode Makybe Diva in all three of her Melbourne Cup wins.
Makybe Diva's trainer, Lee Freedman, says the mare has proved herself to be 'one of the all-time greats ... I don't think the country has seen a better horse in the past 30 or 40 years'. As well as the three Melbourne Cup wins, Makybe Diva won a Sydney Cup, an Australian Cup and the BMW at Rosehill Gardens in Sydney.
In October 2006, a bronzed statue of Makybe Diva was unveiled in the South Australian city of Port Lincoln, the home-town of her owner Tony Santic.
One of the world's most challenging horse races
The Melbourne Cup is one of the world's most challenging horse races and one of the richest (total prize money for 2005 - $AU5.1 million).
The race is run over 3200 metres and is a handicapped race. This means that the better the horse is, the more weight it has to carry in the race.
Racing action. Photograph courtesy of the Victoria Racing Club and Getty Images
The Cox Plate , a weight-for-age race run late in October at the Moonee Valley race course, also in Melbourne, is considered the race most likely to provide an insight into a horse's form. But even this is unreliable as a predictor of likely Melbourne Cup performance.
The distance and the handicap ensure that the Melbourne Cup is a horse race in which the occasional punter has as good a chance of picking the winner as those who follow the form.
Phar Lap, in his last Melbourne Cup campaign in 1931, carried a 68kg (10 stone) handicap. Even a horse with a heart as big as Phar Lap's couldn't overcome the extra weight and the race was won by White Nose.
