The Melbourne Cup is one of the most important days on the Australian social calendar being an opportunity for Australians all around the country to put on their best fashions and check out the race at race tracks all around the country. It is widely known as the race that stops the nation and it is the most watched sporting event in the country. The race was started in 1861 by the Victorian Turf Club and has been going from strength to strength.

The cup is held each year at the Flemington Racetrack, which is located only 15 minutes out of Melbourne’s CBD. Over the first couple of years the race was a small affair, but it very quickly grew to be a highlight on the society calendar attracting the society ladies and the upper class to the garden parties and lawn parties at the race track. It has long been equally associated with fashion as it is with horses.

At first the cup was always run on a Thursday, but from 1875 onwards it has always been run on the first Tuesday in November and it is a date that just about every Australian will be able to quote. At about this time the cup was starting to attract huge crowds to the track passing 100,000 attendees, an incredible number of spectators when you realize that Melbourne’s population at the time was less than 300,000.

At the end of the 19th century Australia had an economic depression that saw up to one third of the workforce unemployed. Due to the economic hardships that the country was going through the trophy was not presented between 1894 and 1898.

When the 20th century arrived Melbourne was recovering from the economic battering along with the rest of Australia. This carefree period was to be brief however, with World War I just over the horizon. In 1906 the horse called Poseidon became a household name as it became the first horse in the history of the race to win the Melbourne Cup, Caulfield Cup, AJC and VRC Derby all in the same racing season.

By 1930 the Melbourne Cup was cemented in people’s hearts and minds as a great Australian tradition and it was at this point when Australia’s most famous horse Phar Lap became the world’s greatest race horse. When Phar Lap entered the cup in 1930 it had the shortest odds that have ever been placed in the cup’s history – 11/8. Phar Lap trounced the opposition and won a lot of people badly needed money in the Great Depression. Unfortunately the great horse’s run came to an end when he died in 1932 in California in suspicious circumstances and it is widely believed that the horse was murdered.

The photo finish was brought to the race in 1946 and was required in 1948 to decide the winner Ray Neville a 15 year old jockey with only nine previous rides up his sleeve.

The Melbourne Cup has over its long history become an important element of Australian culture and it is looked forward to by masses of sporting and fashion fans each year.

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