Bart’s LUCKY LAST HURRAH
The 2008 Melbourne Cup was full of surprises, and a crowd of 107,280 was on hand to witness it. But for master trainer Bart Cummings, winning Australia’s greatest race was simply continuing a long-time habit. Just when you think you’d seen it all in the Melbourne Cup, there was Bart. Bart and his 12 Cups and 250 Group 1 victories. Bart, with his white wavy hair and bushy eyebrows, winning one for all the octogenarians and, if you believe the publicity, winning one for all of Australia. Bart, doing something so utterly unfathomable with Viewed that, no matter what horse you backed – runner-up Bauer included – you just shook your head in awe at the genius of it all. Indeed, it was a Cup that defied the odds in more ways than one. A race that came perilously close, in the aftermath of the equine influenza quarantine inquiry, to having no international representation at all. Then, when they came, they came in numbers. Nine of them, including All The Good, who would give Godolphin its first Australian Group 1 winner in the Caulfield Cup and have everyone talking about how the internationals would dominate the Melbourne Cup as never before. Never mind that All The Good and Yellowstone had fallen by the wayside before the big day – there were still seven into the barriers, including the favourite Mad Rush, the world’s highest-ranked stayer Septimus and Dermot Weld’s street- corner tip Profound Beauty. On Cup Eve, one of the daily newspapers even ran a front page story asking if an Australian horse would ever win the Cup again.
First published in Inside Headquarters
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