Melbourne Cup

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The $5.1 million Emirates Melbourne Cup is more than just a horse race – it’s a 146 year-old social and cultural tradition that literally brings Australia to a standstill! The Melbourne Cup race draws competitors from all over the world with the annual invasion of northern hemisphere-trained stayers making it a truly international event.

The Emirates Melbourne Cup now attracts a worldwide television audience of around 700 million people in 120 countries and territories while millions more either view or listen to the event via the internet.

The Melbourne Cup is the linchpin of the Victoria Racing Club's annual four-day Melbourne Cup Carnival and the highlight of Victoria's statewide Spring Racing Carnival.

Melbourne Cup Day is Australia's most famous Tuesday. It's a day when a nation stops whatever it's doing to listen to the race call, or watch the race on TV, and even those who don't usually bet buy a ticket in a sweep.

At 3.20pm AEST, on the first Tuesday in November, Australians everywhere stop for one of the world's most famous horse races - the Melbourne Cup.

In Melbourne, Cup Day is the peak of the Spring Racing Carnival - when champagne and canapés, huge hats and race track fashions sometimes overshadow the business of the day - horse racing.

Said American writer, Mark Twain, on a visit: "Nowhere in the world have I encountered a festival of people that has such a magnificent appeal to the whole nation. The Melbourne Cup astonishes me."

The first Melbourne Cup was run in 1861 at Flemington race course and was won by Archer. It has run every year since. Through wars and depression, and the good times too, the Melbourne Cup racing carnival has been one of the stayers of Australian cultural experience.

The Melbourne Cup is one of the world's most challenging horse races, and one of the richest, and the picking of winners an imprecise art at best. The race is run over 3200 metres and is a handicapped race. This means, theoretically, that the better the horse is the more weight it has to carry.

The Cox Plate and Caulfield Cup are considered the races most likely to provide an insight into a horse's form and likely Melbourne Cup performance, but even this is unreliable.

The distance and the handicap ensure that the Melbourne Cup is a horse race in which the mug punter has as good a chance of picking the winner as those who follow the form.

Phar Lap, in his last Melbourne Cup campaign in 1931, carried a 10 stone (68kg) handicap. Even a horse with a heart as big as Phar Lap's couldn't overcome it. The race was won by White Nose.

Viewed, trained by Bart Cummings and ridden by Blake Shinn wins the 2008 Melbourne Cup, just edgeing out Bauer. An incredible achievement for Bart Cummings, who now has 12 cups to his name. Enjoy this video replay of the 2008 Melbourne Cup.