MV On Track 2018

ON TRACK MAGAZINE 7 L es Carlyon, who has seen Cox Plates since Tulloch was the hero of the era six decades ago, posed that question a long time ago. The question hasn’t changed but the answer has, more than once. We marvelled at Northerly and Sunline and Makybe Diva the year she nailed the W.S. Cox Plate before going on to win her third Melbourne Cup. We saw Might and Power rocket to a speed record that would stand until a faster horse turned up. There’s So You Think’s back-to-back win in 2010, so stylish and assured that surely he’d have won a third W.S. Cox Plate if market forces hadn’t shanghaied him to Ireland to frank his stallion credentials with Group 1 victories in Europe. Reg Fleming, who prepared So You Think at Flemington for Bart Cummings, reckons this Adonis of a horse would have made hacks of the field that Pinker Pinker beat in 2011. And he thinks the big, beautiful entire could easily have lined up a fourth time, full of running. We will never know. Any more than we will know how much better Saintly would have become if he hadn’t broken down as a four-year-old after landing the 1996 Cox Plate-Melbourne Cup double; Bart thought he was still improving at the time. What we do know is that probably the greatest race mare of them all is poised to defy the weight of history and some of the better middle-distance horses on earth next month, in her fourth straight Cox Plate. Winx will start at folk hero odds, all going well. But no matter what happens this spring, or doesn’t, she is already a champion for the ages. In a sense, she is racing in extra time, the clock counting down her already extraordinary career. But how long before the bell rings? Convention says that, at seven years old, a fourth Cox Plate would be more bonus than extra proof of greatness. But Winx is not your conventional mare. Everything suggests she is the same unbeatable galloper that won the Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Royal Randwick in autumn, her 25th straight win. On the spelling farm in May she bucked around her paddock like a rodeo bronc – but she is so sensible that children can sit on her bareback. When a physiotherapist lifts and stretches her legs, she handles it with the aplomb of a human athlete. Dapples ripple under the gleaming dark bay coat as they did when she got to Flemington last spring. All ominous signs for opponents. If Winx does overcome all the split-second things that can go wrong in a race, let alone in a preparation, winning The Valley’s heavyweight title again begs comparison with any racehorse in history. All the way back to the unbeaten Eclipse, whose genes run through every horse in the field. Winx has made top international horses look drab; she has run world-class times, matching Black Caviar sprint sectionals in the last 600 metres of middle-distance races. She has won on good tracks and bog tracks, under handicap weights and at weight-for-age, against both sexes and all ages, from 1100 to 2200 metres.