Are you ready to Melbourne Cup Day?

Friday, 30 October 2015
By Nanni Henrique 

If you live in Australia, must be asking ‘why a horse race might be so important for all of the Australians citizens?’ It is true.

Melbourne Cup Day is the most important event in the year. It is ‘The race that stops a nation’ (as a poem by Vivienne McCredie).

Pubs, restaurants, companies… everything is organized for a three minutes horses race at Melbourne’s famed Flemington Racecourse, annually on the first Tuesday of November.

Some of the best horses in the world run for a chance to claim $6.2 million prize money that have offered each year, since 2012. The Melbourne Cup is one of the richest and most prestigious ‘two-mile’ (3,200 metres) race. Australians people spend a lot of time searching and reading about the favourite horses to bet. 

You can do the same. Just stay tuned for all variables and factors that you can take into calculation and choose between 24 runners, such as winning a listed race, ability to to handle the 3,200 metre distance of the race, weight and age. All of the rules just to guarantee that every horse an equal chance of winning the race and hinder bets. The Melbourne Cup is always a very difficult race for punters and in the last thirty years only 5 horses listed as favourites became champions.

[table of odds of horses]

Prepare your best-dressed and the most elegant hat, book your place in some pub, restaurant or track field and live as an Australian citizen, at least one day. Might be a great and funny different day. Melbourne Cup is coming.

Some curiosities about Melbourne Cup

The current record holder is Kingston Rule, who won the 1990 Melbourne Cup with a time of 3 minutes and 16.3 seconds.

Melbourne Cup Day has been a state public holiday in Victoria since 1877. For this reason, Melbourne Cup Day always experiences large crowd numbers. The record high was in 2003 when a total of 122,736 people attended.

“The Race That Stops the Nation” is a poem about Australia’s fascination with the Melbourne Cup. Sydney born writer Vivienne McCredie wrote it in 1986.

International horses that qualify for the Melbourne Cup field must be quarantined for a minimum period of 14 days before they can travel to Australia.

Race day fashion has occasionally drawn almost as much attention as the race itself. The requirement for elegant hats, and more recently the alternative of a fascinator, almost single-handedly keeps Melbourne's milliners in business.

Flowers, over 200 varieties but especially roses, are an important component of the week's racing at Flemington. The racecourse has around 12,000 roses within its large expanse.