The race that really does stop a nation

There aren’t too many other sporting events in the world that merit a public holiday. The residents of New South Wales had to turn up to work today, but office workers across the land are unlikely to be productive on the first Tuesday in November — the day when dressing up, having a flutter and getting drunk are a patriotic duty.

This is the first Melbourne Cup I have witnessed from within the nation that grinds to a halt in order to watch a field of 21 horses run anti-clockwise around 3.2 kilometres of Flemington race track at an average speed of around 53 kilometres an hour, and the hype is true. You’ve never seen anything like it.

The Melbourne Cup , the greatest distance race in the world, was first run in 1861 and is deeply ingrained in Australian national identity. Great Melbourne Cup winners – the immortal Phar Lap, Saintly, Makybe Diva — are national heroes. Australia and New Zealand still bicker over the remains of Phar Lap, the chestnut gelding who was bred in New Zealand, raced in Australia and died in North America of arsenic poisoning.

The excitement started to build about two weeks ago as the media coverage ramped up. Over the past week, many miles of column inches have been devoted to analysing the field and following the drama. The Australians resented all the foreign horses being flown in to win the Cup. All the Good, the horse owned by the stupendously wealthy Sheikh Maktoum of Dubai, was injured during a gallop and had to be withdrawn. Septimus, the favourite, trained by Irish maestro Aidan O’Brien, would not run if the track was too hard. A woman jockey, Clare Windop, won the Victoria Derby on Saturday and was scheduled to ride Moatize in the Cup. Yellowstone flew out from England for nothing after he got stuck in his box and injured his hip; the English jockey booked to ride him was fined $8,000 after calling the stewards “tinpot Hitlers”.

The Sydney CBD today was filled with women dressed up in racing attire: skimpy dresses, hats, high heels and punters queuing up at the specially erected TAB marquee in Martin Place. Almost everyone in the office discussed their selections. Profound Beauty was a popular choice. Mad Rush was another. Someone sent around an analysis of the runners by the quant analysts at Goldman Sachs: they recommended a box trifecta including Mad Rush, Septimus, Bauer, Honolulu, Profound Beauty and Nom du Jeu.

The agency put on a barbecue with sausages, salad and wine and beer and we crowded into one of the boardrooms to watch the race on one of two screens. None of us could hear a thing as the horses stormed to the finish and for a while it was unclear who had won.

As luck would have it, I managed to avoid the first four horses quite comprehensively. I selected South African Jeff Lloyd’s ride Nom du Jeu on the basis of sentiment; my other sentimental picks, the Irish horses Septimus (sired by my favourite stallion, Sadlers Wells) and Honolulu (a grandson of Sadlers Wells, and Barack Obama’s late grandmother lived in Hawaii) and an outsider, Barbaricus, who raced well on Saturday (the Australians race their horses hard and often only give them a couple of days’ break between races).

Sentiment, as it turned out, would have been a useful guide to the actual winner. Viewed is a grandson of Sadlers Wells and is trained by 81-year-old Bart Cummings, who first trained a horse in the Cup fifty years ago. Moreover, he raced on Saturday. At odds of over 40-1, I could have made a tidy profit, but alas not.

After Viewed came Bauer, C’est La Guerre and the rest. Nom du Jeu finished eighth. Septimus ran eighteenth, just in front of Barbaricus. Honolulu finished last. The fear that foreign horses would completely dominate turned out to be unfounded. Regardless of the fact that I managed to avoid picking the winner or anyone who finished near the winner, I’m glad that there was a good news story in here — how can you not respond to an old guy with bushy eyebrows — and to be part of something that gets everyone so excited was really quite special.

As I write, a group of colleagues are sitting over in a corner of the office drinking wine and beer and comparing notes. The relevant Wikipedia entries have long since been updated (within a few minutes of the winner crossing the line). Next time, they keep saying, they’re going to pick the winner. And all I can think is: if that’s the recommendation that the Goldman Sachs quant analysts came up with, no wonder the global financial system is in such trouble.