Op-Ed: Matthew Sandblom - The Cup of dread

I used to love the Melbourne Cup, but now I dread it .

I had my first bet on the Melbourne Cup at 11-years-old at the local TAB, I was tall for my age and it was a different time. At high school I was the bookie and took over 1000 bets from students and teachers when Van Der Hum won the Cup in 1976 on a bog track.

I also spent about 10 years going to the Cup as a guest of Bart Cummings, getting an inside view of the action with the man whose name was synonymous with the Cup, including the year when Viewed won by a nostril.

As an adult I looked forward to Cup week more than I did to Christmas. It was also the one time of the year when the general public took an interest in racing and when racing is front page news.

Now I dread the race and just hope a horse doesn't break down again.

Most of the horses who line up now each year are unknown to me. I have not watched them progress through the grades or seen them win one of the lead-up races. The first time I really noticed Twilight Payment was when the race caller mentioned his name during the running of the Cup.

The high levels of breakdowns and my lack of interest come from the same cause; the dominance of fly-in fly-out horses in the Melbourne Cup.

The Victoria Racing Club has really gone all out to make this an international race and the handicapper has helped out by generously weighting the raiders. We all know that Europe specialises in breeding and training stayers and their standard in this area is much higher than ours. Most Group 2 and 3 staying races in Europe would be better than Australian Group 1s over the same distances, once you have taken any imported horses out.

So the Melbourne Cup has become a prestigious and rich race for European horses to compete in. The problem is that they have to run 3200 metres on one of the hardest racetrack surfaces in Australia.

In the week before this year’s Cup the course curator put 40mm of irrigation on the Flemington track but it still came up as a Good 3 by the time the Cup was run. And a Good 3 at Flemington is more like a Good 2 at other tracks. My horse Purple Sector ran in the race after the Cup, he loves a dry track and Craig Williams said afterwards he was feeling the hard track.

If you want to run a rich European staying handicap in early November in Melbourne then give them a track that they are used to, at least a Dead 5 or Slow 6, otherwise expect the breakdowns to continue.

When you exclude the overseas-trained horses, the only Australasian-bred and trained horse to be catastrophically injured in the Cup in the last 40 years was Dulcify in 1979.

My own dread of the running of the Cup is not unique to me.

Most of the people who earn their livelihoods from the industry have similar thoughts. From the trainer trying to get new people to buy a share in a horse, to the breeder worrying about the long term future of the industry with the bad publicity this event seems to generate each year. All because the VRC wants it to be an international race but this no longer benefits the industry as a whole.

Yes, the Melbourne Cup has a rich tradition and was once racing’s great annual showpiece. But the reality is much of the traditions of this race have already gone. The traditional lead-up races have lost their meaning, the tradition of seeing horses come up through the grades and reach the pinnacle have gone and the tradition of a big spread in the handicappers weights has also disappeared.

So what exactly are we left with? A race that no longer represents what Australian racing is about and is developing a tradition of providing ammunition for everyone who wants to bring the sport and the industry down.