‘Thought we were mad’: The race that changed the Melbourne Cup forever

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It started with a young Irish boy and a book of bush poetry and ended up changing horse racing forever.

And even the scorn of Bart Cummings, the undisputed King of the Melbourne Cup, was never enough to dent Dermot Weld’s belief that a horse could travel halfway around the world and win Australia’s great race.

Irish trainer Dermot Weld took a risk and flew Vintage Crop to Melbourne – where it won the Cup in 1993.Credit: The Age

“World racing has changed so dramatically in the past 30 years since, and I predicted at the time when we won with Vintage Crop that the success would internationalise the Melbourne Cup,” Weld, 75, says.

“I didn’t realise how true my words would become. Back then people tended to be happy to stay within their own continents, be they America, Europe or Australia and compete at home.”

Thirty years since Weld’s horse and jockey Michael Kinane proved Cummings and the rest of the doubters’ wrong, becoming the first European raiders to win the Cup, the veteran Irish trainer’s eyes still light up when he recalls that first Tuesday in November in 1993.

The trip was 17,000 km long and took 38 hours. Thick fog on the morning the horse was meant to leave Dublin nearly cost them their slot out of Ireland. So many things nearly went wrong that Weld has a sense that, beyond his planning and preparation, that it was meant to be. It was a lot of work for a race that lasted less than 3 ½ minutes.

Galloping home: Vintage Crop running in the 1993 Melbourne Cup.Credit: The Age

The result, winning from Te Akau Nick by three lengths, would forever change the race – for better or worse. The Cup, first run in 1866, is now dominated by internationally bred horses. In the three decades since, more than 250 horses trained outside Australia have competed at the spring carnival, with trainers and jockeys from Ireland, Germany, France, England and Japan having “stolen” the famed-three handled trophy.

“Most people in both Ireland and Australia thought we were mad to try it at the time. The locals gave us no chance. The main reason being the six-week gap or whatever it was since Vintage Crop’s last run,” Weld, perched on a wooden bench at the famed Tattersall’s horse sales at Newmarket, tells this masthead.

“Great trainers like Bart Cummings, who I got to know well, and I appreciated very much his genius, he dismissed our chance completely. He reckoned the distance we travelled, our lack of a recent run and the fact our jockey Michael Kinane hadn’t ridden in Australia before would all count against us.

“But I knew my horse well and that he ran well fresh off a break. He was a clear-winded horse, and it was a case of having him fresh and well, and he just came right on the day.”

The son of a trainer and himself a champion amateur jockey, Weld had worked at the great Tommy Smith’s Tulloch Lodge stables in Sydney, where Kingston Town was trained, in the 1970s soon after he qualified as a vet in Dublin. But he’d first learned of the relationship between Australians and their horses, and the cultural significance of the Cup, much earlier in life.

Weld (right) with Bart Cummins and Luca Cumani in 2008.Credit: Paul Rovere

“My father trained for Major E.P. Douglas, a lovely man, who gave me a book of Banjo Paterson’s poetry for my eighth birthday. That’s what really stimulated my interest in far-away Australia,” says Weld, who recited Paterson’s A Bush Christening during the Melbourne Cup’s post-race press conference. “I used to bring that book to bed with me at nighttime, I have still got it today, and I treasure it.”

There had been international entries for the holy grail of Southern Hemisphere racing in the years before 1993, including Vintage Crop in 1992, yet none ever travelled. Quarantine requirements were too strict, while planes carrying horses were forced to take a route that made a marathon journey even more arduous.

“That first entry stimulated the late David Bourke, the chairman of the VRC at the time, to try and facilitate international participation,” Weld says. “He saw this Irish horse entered but who couldn’t run because, for starters, the quarantine facilities in Australia weren’t appropriate. We had to change the flight path of the planes, and we had to get permission for the planes to land on the African subcontinent.

“We also had to change the quarantine rules for Australia as there were no training facilities at the existing quarantine base, it was only suitable for mares or stallions, so we had to get that changed to a racetrack where horses could exercise.”

Weld credits both Bourke and Les Benton, then VRC racing manager, with getting those changes implemented in time for the 1993 running. He praised the work of the Department of Agriculture in Canberra too, working in conjunction with the equivalent European Union departments in Brussels.

Years later Benton shudders when he thinks about what would have become of the international experiment gone horribly wrong.

“Had Vintage Crop not won it would have been a big, big ask to get them to keep coming here,” he said. “Bringing those first two horses out was one of the most significant moments in Australian racing history. It established the Melbourne spring carnival as a worldwide sporting event.”

The win changed Weld’s life too. It generated an immense feel-good factor in Ireland, whose economy was in the doldrums and whose sporting prowess on foreign fields was minimal at the time. He was voted the country’s personality of the year after the win. His book about the event, Against All Odds, rose to number five on the non-fiction best-selling list.

Vintage Crop ran in the race twice more, finishing unplaced in 1994 behind Jeune and third in 1995 behind Doriemus. There’s a now statue of him at the Curragh, Weld’s home track in County Kildare. Weld would win the Cup again with Media Puzzle in one of the race’s most memorable finishes. Vinnie Roe, perhaps Weld’s best horse, would try three times, finishing an unlucky fourth, second and eighth.

Weld, who is still winning big races around the world, hasn’t ruled out a return to Flemington one last time. If he can find the right horse.

“A stayer with speed is what you need,” he says with a spark in his eyes. “It’s what I’m always looking out for.”

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