Kiwi heroine Verry Elleegant lands fairytale Melbourne Cup success
Waller, McDonald land first wins in Australia’s flagship race as mare shoulders champions’ weight to four-length success
No matter what heights have previously been scaled, there are moments that feel defining.
Yesterday’s Melbourne Cup (Gr 1, 3200m) triumph for Verry Elleegant (Zed) encapsulated just what the great race signifies. For all the big-race, Group 1 success accumulated before, a first victory in the Melbourne Cup takes every bygone achievement and elevates it to a thing of immortality.
Verry Elleegant had nine Group 1s. Chris Waller; 128, and James McDonald; 56. Yet, now, last year’s Australian Horse of the Year, perennial champion trainer and record-breaking jockey, will forever be introduced as a ‘Melbourne Cup-winning mare, trainer or rider’.
This Melbourne Cup was very much made in New Zealand. However, for what has been Kiwi-bred mare Verry Elleegant’s adopted home for a tick over three years, it was the feel-good sight that was meant to be, as the rampant sweetheart of the Australian turf burst clear over the concluding 300 metres, to lead home a valiant effort from Queensland’s red-hot $2.90 favourite Incentivise (Shamus Award), who post-race was discovered to have swelling on his near foreleg.
Just as with her New Zealand expat trainer and jockey, Australia has adopted the champion as one of their own.
The ‘domestic’ duo fended off the leading international hope in Spanish Mission (Noble Mission), who was a long neck third.
The manner and statistical improbability of Verry Elleegant’s win will anoint this 161st running of the Melbourne Cup as one of the greatest, while her record as a winner of the Australian Oaks (Gr 1, 2400m) at three, Tancred Stakes (Gr 1, 2400m) at four, Caulfield Cup (Gr 1, 2400m) at five, as well as a Group 1 winner over seven furlongs in the Winx Stakes (Gr 1, 1400m), will see her go down as one of the classiest winners of the time-honoured race.
The winning margin of four lengths is the greatest since Protectionist (Monsun) recorded the same winning distance in 2014, while her weight carried of 57 kilograms makes her the classiest since the greatest of all Melbourne Cup mares, three-time winner Makybe Diva (Desert King), who shouldered 58 kilograms to victory in 2005.
And, in continuing a trend of firsts associated with this win, Verry Elleegant did it all from barrier 18 – the only gate, prior to yesterday, that was yet to have yielded a winner in the race’s history, since barriers were introduced in 1924.
Chris Waller revealed he came extremely close to scratching Verry Elleegant prior to the race, and was not present at Flemington on this year’s first Tuesday in November to witness his first win in the contest, instead watching the race from his Sydney home with his wife and children, a fact which for the nine-time champion trainer made yesterday’s triumph that bit more special.
“When she crossed the line, I was very emotional,” Waller, trainer of 25-time Group 1 winner Winx (Street Cry), told Racing.com shortly after the race.
“I really wanted to be there to share it with the staff and those who have worked so hard, but to watch it with my family made it very, very special.
“It makes it pretty special to have another mare like this one. So brave, so determined and so good. We’ve had some great wins and important wins and this is certainly one of them.
“It’s going to take a while to sink in. At the moment it just sits as a moment to remember as a proud horse trainer. It’s the Melbourne Cup, so it’s very special and just the way she won it. She dropped on them and showed her class.
“She was the class of the race and she showed that with that finish, that I’ll never forget.”
James McDonald, who teamed up with the Waller-trained Nature Strip (Nicconi) to land the lucrative $15 million The Everest (1200m) in October, a double also achieved by Kerrin McEvoy in 2018, was overcome with emotion in the immediate aftermath of the race.
“It means everything,” McDonald said. “It’s the one race I’ve dreamed of riding in and of winning. That’s how you want to win a Melbourne Cup.
“I couldn’t believe the position I got first time out of the straight, she was so relaxed and she never touched the bridle until I gave her a kick at the 600-metre mark and she sucked up.
“I could see the favourite (Incentivise) getting shoved along but I had seen that in the Caulfield Cup as well. When I went past him, I just wanted that post to come up.”
McDonald celebrates his 57th Group 1 success, eight of them arriving courtesy of Verry Elleegant, with only last year’s Covid-19 protocols thwarting that number being ten.
“To pilot horses like Verry Elleegant each and every carnival is just a huge privilege and it worked out really well for us today,” he continued.
“It doesn’t always happen like that and you take the good with the bad, but today we were lucky enough to win a Melbourne Cup.”
If the triumph of horse, trainer and jockey was one of creating legends out of legends, the story of how it all began for Verry Elleegant is somewhat of an unheralded fairytale.
The six-year-old is the flagbearer for her sire, Zed (Zabeel), the Grangewilliam Stud stallion who, prior to his acquisition by stud principal Mark Corcoran in 2013, was spending his days covering Clydesdale mares at Erehwon Station (ironically, or perhaps not, spelt ‘nowhere’, backwards). While her 83-year-old breeder, New Zealander Don Goodwin who initially retained her to race, pitted Zed to his mare Opulence (Danroad) in 2014 and, well, the rest is history.
A winner of just a maiden on the track, Zed, a half-brother to two stakes winners, initially stood at Little Avondale Stud for the introductory fee of $500, covering 131 mares in his first season at stud.
However, his mare numbers then dwindled, as he made way for Nadeem (Redoute’s Choice) on the Masterton stud’s roster, finding his way to ‘nowhere’.
In 2013, a first season at Grangewilliam and, amidst domestic Group 1 success for the John Bary-trained Survived on the eve of the breeding season beginning, he covered 168 mares, the highest number in New Zealand that year.
Yet, in the years following, he averaged a book of around 50, that was until the breakout stakes success of Verry Elleegant in 2018 and a spike to 81, before covering 63 and 64 mares in the last two seasons.
From 275 runners to date he has amassed 14 individual stakes winners.
New Zealand continues under Covid-19 restraints, however that did not stop Corcoran and his wife Anne from celebrating in style at their property yesterday, with their second Grangewilliam-branded Melbourne Cup victory after Doriemus (Norman Pentaquad) in 1995, who also scored by a dominant four-length margin.
“We’re over the moon. We’re having a bit of a party here in Waitotara,” he told ANZ Bloodstock News. “We’re limited to 100 because of Covid rules, so we’ve had 100 on the dot and we’re having a great day. We’ll be partying on through the night.
“He’s just the most underrated stallion of all time,” he continued. “They said she can’t run on top of the ground, but the Zeds, they run on anything.
“And she’s a legend, only one mare has ever carried more weight and that’s Makybe Diva.
“It’s the second GW-brand horse to win the Cup. Doriemus won the Caulfield Cup-Melbourne Cup double and obviously Verry Elleegant won a Caulfield Cup and now she’s won a Melbourne Cup, so it’s good dirt here at Grangewilliam and we keep producing the good horses.”
The rise of Verry Elleegant (6 m Zed – Opulence by Danroad) on the track traces back to her private purchase by Andrew Williams in 2018, and the mare’s later transfer to Chris Waller in the spring of that year following the suspension of Darren Weir.
A winner of three of her first four starts for Waller, including her first two Group 1 wins in the Vinery Stud Stakes (2000m) and Australian Oaks, she takes her career figures to 15 wins from 34 starts and over $14 million in prize-money, which sees her sit less than $250,000 shy of Makybe Diva in fifth on the all-time Australian earners list.
However, her journey to being was set in motion by her breeder, Don Goodwin, who purchased her dam Opulence in foal to Towkay (Last Tycoon) at the New Zealand Bloodstock National Mare sale in 2011 for $14,000, with Verry Elleegant her third produce, while Goodwin has shares in the stallion, Zed.
Speaking from Auckland yesterday, Goodwin spoke of his elation to have bred a Melbourne Cup winner.
“I am immensely proud,” he said. “I was pretty confident but I was even more confident at the end of the big straight at the start of the race. It was a brilliant ride, he (jockey James McDonald) just got her in the right position.
“I thought the Oaks win at Randwick was pretty good, but the Melbourne Cup, oh Christ.”
Save for one year when Goodwin sent the mare to Haradasun (Fusaichi Pegasus), she has been covered each season by Zed. Her second foal was the Group 3-placed Verry Flash, a brother to Verry Elleegant, while her Bob Peters-owned three-year-old sibling Affluential trialed in WA in September. Opulence has a two-year-old colt by Zed and will be covered by the stallion again having not been served last year.
“He is a well-bred sire, but he is not a physically imposing sire,” Goodwin said.
“She is the best of them and the mare (Opulence) is in foal to Zed again. He is not a one-horse wonder.
“Opulence goes back through Cotehele House to Eight Carat who is one of the best broodmares in New Zealand.
“It is a very good family.”
Incentivise injured but Cup runs with no fatalities
It will be a welcome relief to Racing Victoria and the VRC that this year’s running of the Melbourne Cup passed with no fatalities.
A notable and well documented fact of this year’s running of the race was the lack of international participants, partly induced by the new veterinary checks introduced by RV, which saw contenders CT scanned and undergoing a scintigraphy examination before taking their place on the Flemington two-mile start line.
Young Werther (Tavistock) was denied a start following results of the test, while last year’s champion Twilight Payment (Teofilo) and the Andrew Balding-trained Spanish Mission were the only international fly-in, fly-out horses to embark on the trip from Europe.
Injuries have been reported by short-priced favourite Incentivise, who will be monitored over the next few days, and ninth-place finisher Tralee Rose (Tavistock), who was taken for x-rays after being trampled on.
Calls for changes to this year’s protocols have been made from several quarters, most notably from Joseph O’Brien and ANZ Bloodstock News columnist Jamie Lovett of Australian Bloodstock, as well as OTI Racing after their Future Score (Cape Cross) was scratched at the final hour, however authorities will feel vindicated that a repeat trend of recent years, where six deaths since 2013 have occurred in the race, did not occur in 2021.