Month: November 2005

Thursday saw my first trip to the race ground itself (and in fact my first trip to a race ground anywhere, for that matter), as we headed to Flemington for Oaks Day. Unfortunately my betting abilities were in no way improved by my proximity to the races themselves, but it was still a fun way to spend the day, swanning around in a suit, drinking cheap Champagne, eating “Dim Sim” on a stick (a bizarre Australian-Chinese hybrid of a food that seems to consist of some kind of fried fat, with a coating of some more fat, dipped in soy sauce), and wandering over to the bookies to give them money in return for an extra element of excitement in the next race. The best I managed all day was a solitary place in the seventh race, but even then the odds were so poor that my each way bet paid out less than my total initial stake.

By the time I returned to the course on Saturday (for Stakes day, and Chris’s stag do), I was slowly coming to the realisation that the only way I’d ever stand any chance of any kind of betting success was to abdicate responsibility for any actual decision making, and let someone do it. It was time to join a syndicate.

And so it was that I ended up going in with four of the other guys, and we decided to try to pick the trifecta (a type of bet where you win by picking all of the first three horses in the race, in order). There were five of us, so we picked a horse each for each of five races, and took it in turns to put the bet on, each time betting on all possible combinations of those five horses so that, should any three of our five come in in the first three places in any order, we’d be in the money. We put the bet on at 50 cents, so with 60 possible combinations of our 5 horses, it was a total $30 bet each, and we knew that we’d get half of any displayed prize money at the end of the race.

After 3 fruitless races, I was starting to think that my jinx was carrying over into other people’s bets. Even worse, it was now my turn to stick the bet on. Scanning the odds in the creased copy of the Herald Sun we were all circled around, I opted for “Grey Song”. At 26-1, it clearly had no chance of coming in the places, but at least if by some miracle it did we’d get a decent return. The others gave me their four horses in turn, and off I trotted to the TAB desk to put our bet on, and we settled back in at our spot by the finish line to watch race 7, the Queen Elizabeth Stakes.

By the time the horses came round the final bend, two of our horses were running in first and second places. Close, but clearly not enough. But what’s this? It’s Grey Song making a late dash round the outside and appearing to cross the line in third place.

“I think we’ve got it!” I shouted, as we all waited eagerly for the giant TV screen to display the result. Sure enough, there were three of our horses, including my Grey Song. And thanks to those long odds, it paid out $1987… er, of which we got half, and it was split between 5 people, and it was Australian dollars. But, hey, it’s the most money I’ve ever won and going to collect it was an extremely satisfying moment. “Is Green OK?” said the woman as she started counting out $100 bills in front of me. Oh yes. That’ll do nicely…

Pleasing to see that I’ll still be able to keep up with the fortunes of Everton if I ever have to live over in Australia for some reason, at least as long as we have an Australian player–the Herald Sun, the shabby sub-Daily Mail Murdoch tabloid that is ubiquitous in these parts, providing a handy does of right-wing paranoia and scaremongering for those with a fear of the different, tells me that “Aussie Tim Cahill played a full 90 minutes in Everton’s one-nil victory over Middlesborough”. Thanks for that. I’m sure no one here could possibly want to know any more information about that, such as who scored the goal, for example. Presumably that was a non-Australian.

If you ever find yourself on the streets of an Australian town centre, you might get to witness a very Australian shopping phenomenon: businesses attempting to drum up trade by employing some hapless assistant to stand outside with a microphone announcing the various bargains and discounts on offer. I’ve seen this before, on my previous two trips to the country, and I’ve always found it rather amusing, in a low-budget, 1970s kind of way. Still, wasn’t quite what I was expecting as I stepped off the plane at Tullamarine airport, but sure enough, there opposite the walkway was a woman greeting us with “some fantastic offers” on various alcoholic beverages available in the duty free shop. “Some really great savings to be made today”, she said. Frankly, whiskey is probably the last thing I want to think about after spending the best part of 24 hours in the air, but there you go.

The first week of our stay over here was dominated by the Spring Racing Carnival, Melbourne’s annual racing festival. It’s big, around these parts. In fact, it was so important to Sal that it caused her to set off early and beat me to the country by just over a day in order to attend Saturday’s Derby Day. For my first taste of the racing, I had to wait until Tuesday, which saw the arrival of Australia’s biggest race, the Melbourne Cup. With Sal’s house stuffed full of friends and relatives attending their barbecue, we ate, drank, and gambled. At three, we left the fuzzy tv in the garage on which we’d been struggling to follow the action up to that point, and headed inside to watch the main event on a tv where you could actually see what was happening. With the BBQ sweep running at $70 for first place, and a stack of betting stubs from the TAB sitting on the kitchen table, the stakes were certainly high.

In terms of the national impact, the Melbourne Cup is a bit like an Australian version of the Grand National–everyone puts a bet on, and everyone pays attention to the result, whether they care about racing or not. Unlike the National, the Melbourne Cup does provide the interesting bonus that, lacking fences as it does, there’s a fairly good chance that your horse will still be running by the end of the race. Not that it makes much difference to me, of course, because it’s spectacularly unlikely that any horse I’ve backed will be anywhere near the front, even if it can get to the finish line.

On the off chance that the event didn’t mean quite so much to the rest of the world as it apparently did to the state of Victoria, I should perhaps mention that, much to the delight of the local media, what was apparently the most important and exciting and relevant thing in the history of everything happened, as the horse that had won for the last two years won the thing again. Far be it from me to suggest that the hyperbolic reaction from the local tv and press was perhaps disproportionate to the shock occurrence of one of the horses in the race winning it, but it seems that history was made. And no, I’m not just bitter because of the fact that my horse cantered over the line in eighth place. It’s just that a later check of the international news websites revealed that the historic event merited little more than a tiny article in the depths of the racing pages. At one point one of Sal’s relatives asked if we usually watched the Melbourne Cup back home. I didn’t have the heart to explain that it isn’t even televised in the UK…