Melbourne Cup

The Melbourne Cup will be on Tuesday, 7 November this year. This horse race, held at Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne, is one of the biggest sports events in Australia. The tag-line is "The race that stops the nations"... and it pretty much does. The day, always the first Tuesday of November, is a holiday in the state of Victoria. Most of the rest of Australia stops whatever they are doing to watch the 3PM race. Many Australians, being Australian, decide to precede the viewing with a champagne lunch, starting at noon and ending sometime early the next morning. Not much work gets done on Melbourne Cup Day. Logical to have such an event on a Tuesday, isn't it?

The first Melbourne Cup was held back in 1861 for a gold watch and 170 pounds. Last year the prize was over $5 million. In 1861, 4000 people turned out for the race; last year over 110,000 turned up for the race itself and nearly 400,000 the Melbourne Cup Carnival. Now I don't know why more people who attended the Carnival didn't crane their necks to watch the race. Perhaps 290,000 of them were busy ordering a round at the bar. Last year, the horse Makybe Diva set a record by winning the cup three times. He's not running tomorrow, and I've yet to put my tips in... so I'll just pick on number, name or colour like usual.

But what is the Melbourne Cup really about? I think largely an excuse to wear a big silly hat. But Mark Twain attended the Cup in 1895 and had this to say, "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." If they wore the hats back then, they too would have astonished Mr. Twain.