Brekkie Crumbs (Notes from the NewsRadio Breakfast team) for Tuesday November 3rd
Helen Thomas - Racing Editor: …
A day is a long time in the life of a racehorse, especially at this time of year.
Anything can and often does go wrong before a race, which makes the fact that our grand trainer Bart Cummings has three runners in the 2009 Melbourne Cup even more astonishing!
The two miles will test every runner, but Bart’s trio - VIEWED, ROMAN EMPEROR and ALLEZ WONDER - have a genuine chance of giving him his first trifecta in the event.
Of the three, VIEWED is aiming for consecutive victories - a huge task.
But it’s fair to say he’s the best horse in the field; Reg Fleming, Bart’s foreman in Melbourne, says he’s the toughest horse he’s ever worked with.
So the stallion should create yet another piece of history for this wonderful stable!
But watch for the mares DAFFODIL and LEICA DING to be flying home too…
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Debbie Spillane - Sport ..
This may well be one of those blogs that, around 3:05pm (EDST) today I’ll wish I hadn’t written. But here goes.
It really has me puzzled how some good horse racing judges I know (yes, I’m looking at you Scott Wales and James Coventry!) can be talking up the chances of Alcopop in today’s Melbourne Cup.
Nobody loves a romantic racing story more than I do and it’d be wonderful stuff if the horse trained on a beach in South Australia by rookie trainer, Jake Stephens, could win Australia’s greatest race after an unconventional career that’s involved being used to muster cattle and having a stint as a polo referee’s horse. What would make it even more real life “National Velvet” is that his jockey Dom Tournier has never ridden in any race at Flemington, let alone something as high-pressure as the Melbourne Cup.
If this was the story behind a 50-1 chance I’d be tempted to have few sentimental bucks on Alcopop myself, but I’m sorry, having a dollar on a horse with a CV like that to win maybe $6 when he’s up against three horses prepared by the old master, Bart Cummings just doesn’t seem like value to me.
The case for Alcopop is that he’s unbeaten this campaign and was very impressive in winning the Herbert Power Stakes on October 10 over 2400 metres. That form was made to look even better when Shocking, the horse who finished behind him in that race, streeted the field in the Saab Quality at Flemington on Saturday.
But the question for me is, how does a rookie trainer prepare a horse to be ready for the Cup’s 3200 metres? Two mile races are such a rarity most trainers don’t know until the race is run whether their horses can last the distance, they just learn from experience what sort of preparation gives them the best chance. That’s what makes Cummings so formidable. Everyone’s talking about his 12 Melbourne Cup winners, but there would be dozens and dozens more that he’s prepared over the past four decades that haven’t won that he’s learned just as much from.
Alcopop’s trainer is undoubtedly an experienced and accomplished horseman, but he’s facing an incredibly specialist challenge today. Alcopop is undoubtedly a horse with an amazing turn of foot, but plenty of horses who’ve been brilliant over one and a half miles haven’t had the stamina to win over two. Jockey Dom Tourneur says he’ll treat the Melbourne Cup as just another race but tell that to sports stars of all stripes who’ve felt the paralysis of big occasion nerves.
If you really like the Alcopop form line go with Shocking who looked great in the Herbert Power and was sharp as a tack in his win on Saturday. He’s prepared by Mark Kavanagh who’s at least trained a Cox Plate winner and will be ridden by the very experienced Corey Brown.
Me, I’ve had a bit on both Roman Emperor and Viewed, so it’ll probably be Bart’s third runner, the mare Allez Wonder, who wins. Or Alcopop. If he does, then I’ll learn something I suppose - namely whether losing face hurts more than what I usually lose: money.
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Marius Benson - Politics …
If you are keeping a diary of Australian politics you should circle Melbourne Cup Day 2009.
It is the day things changed. The day that after two years of spinning their wheels and slipping further and further into the electoral mud, the opposition finally got some traction - Newspoll finally showed the numbers changing.
It was apparent the day before the Newspoll came out that something was up.
Government ministers are a daily part of the NewsRadio news diet and it is my happy task to line them up each evening for interviews the next morning. Those requests meet with general but far from universal success.
What almost never happens is that ministers volunteer themselves for a chat. On Melbourne Cup eve that general rule was broken.
And the enthusiasm of the ministry to get the message out was dwarfed by the Prime Minister who managed five radio interviews in an hour before heading for the studio to do the 7:30 Report.
There was a clear sense of “all hands on deck” and you’d suspect that was prompted by an early word on the Newspoll reversal.
Kevin Rudd has been under pressure from some quarters to use some of the political capital which he holds as Mr 70% to take some moral leadership on the asylum seeker issue. Union leaders have been urging him to bring the 78 people on board the Oceanic Viking to Australia.
The PM has rejected the calls to scale those moral heights, but the issue has still seen him come if not crashing to earth to at least settle into a terrestrial orbit. He has become Mr 59% without winning any praise from the moral high ground advocates.
And if there was any chance of the 78 refugees at the eye of the storm being brought to Australia, it vanished with the Newspoll numbers.
