Cup will stop nation in its tracks

PRISCILLA PRESLEY was in town to plug her new perfume, presented the prizes for the £500,000 Victoria Derby on Saturday when Melbourne's annual Spring Racing Carnival got under way, four days of equine ballyhoo and ersatz bubbly that will draw the thick end of 250,000 paying customers to the broad acres of Flemington racecourse, all little more than an exercise gallop from the city centre.

Many of them will turn up in fancy dress, with little hope or desire of seeing much horseflesh but dead-set on drinking deep, long before tomorrow's nine-race card launches the carnival's centre-piece, the Melbourne Cup.

But the rest of Australia will certainly be viewing at 3.20pm (4.20 a.m. Irish time) when 24 horses of wildly varying quality, three of the better ones trained in Europe including the warm favourite Oscar Schindler, will go like stink after the £750,000 first prize.

That is a staggering sum for a handicap over two miles - more correctly over 3,200 metres, since furlongs shot through Down Under in 1972 - in a global equine calendar now dominated by weight-for-age or Group races.

Despite all the hype deemed necessary to preserve this anomalously prime status, the southern hemisphere's richest horse race once again really will stop a nation in its tracks for five minutes. It is an official public holiday in Victoria and an authentic icon of Ocker culture going back to 1861, decades before the colony-states of Terra Australis federated into modern Australia. In best democratic traditions, the Coup liars given the battler from the bush his chance.

Curious, then, that there should have been public fantasies of having Princess Diana, who is in Sydney, pop down to do the honours after Ms Presley. That notion hit the bottom of the harbour once the exorbitant cost of security was computed and perhaps just as well: republican Australians would only have made cheap jokes about Kings and Princes.

Ruinously expensive might also be the tag for the country's other leggy visitor from the British Isles. Oscar Schindler looks just the sort of gilt-edged handicap certainty that lures punters into penury.

On recent northern-hemisphere form in Group races, the ultra-lenient 8st 13lb burden - sorry 56.5 kg - allotted to the four-year-old makes him look like finding money in the street and, as they say in Australia, Europeans have jumped out of trees to back him. His jockey Mick Kinane has already won the race once on an Irish horse, piloting Vintage Croplin 1993 when he became the first European-trained winner.

Given Oscar's sweeping victory in the Irish St Leger and his breathtaking third in the Arc behind the subsequent Breeders Cup Turf winner, Pilsudski, it was no shock when sheer weight of money forced British bookmakers to cut him from a skinny 7 to 2 last Monday to a silly 2 to 1 by Friday, with William Hill crying it had a "one-horse book" on the race.

What was more surprising was that the locals joined in. One of Australia's elite trainers, the Sydney-based Gai Waterhouse, said that in her opinion Oscar had fully 50 lengths in hand. Oscar's local supporters were heartened yesterday when he was drawn nicely in 12 while the top weight and second favourite Doriemus, having looked crabbed in his final-training gallop at Flemington on Saturday, copped a wide and ostensibly tough draw out in 18. There again, Doriemus won it last year from 24.

Blue-ribbon horses court disaster when they seek to confirm form from often cat-and-mouse Group races in the four-legged lottery of handicaps, especially one that traditionally starts with a cavalry charge out of the stalls before settling down into an elbows-out helter-skelter.

The favourite's trainer Kevin Prendergast was actually born in Australia - the story, as they say, is a long one - so a famous victory will delight not only Kildare but all those who like to see quality horses tough it out against the sort of quality scrappers the Cup attracts.

But Oscar is a big horse needing give in the ground, and balmy 80-degree spring weather has been firming up Flemington by the day. He has come 12,000 miles, which proved too much jet-lag for the Ascot Gold Cup phenomenon Double Trigger last year, and still must travel two furlongs further than he has ever raced tomorrow.

Prendergast described Oscar's final piece of work yesterday as "so perfect, it was frightening

But he is surely no 2 to 1 shot to win this race better, if hardly so romantic, is the 14 to 1 each way about the winner of last month's Caulfield Cup, the four-year-old mare Arctic Scent. Sky's live coverage starts at 4 a.m.