Former leading race caller Bryan Martin and Grahame Begg will be making their Melbourne Cup debuts – as part-owner of Daqiansweet Junior and trainer of Lunar Flare respectively
It's the race every Australian racing fan grows up knowing, the one every breeder, owner, trainer, jockey and strapper wants to win. The Melbourne Cup. It is a race like no other – a two-mile handicap, one not easy to qualify a horse for. One which has been won by Outback teachers and sheikhs alike.
Those who have had runners have described it as the experience of a lifetime, those who've won it … well, their lives change.
Many of the sport’s biggest names have had runners in multiple Cups – good on them! But here we take a look at a couple of high-profile first-timers who on Tuesday will be tasting just what it is like for the very first time.
Dream come true – but it’s 'all out of your hands’
Bryan Martin part-owner of Daqiansweet Junior – and former racecaller
When he was six, Bryan Martin listened to the 1956 Melbourne Cup with his family. He could never have imagined the journey on which horse racing would take him – nor, moreover, that one day he would be standing in the Flemington mounting yard as a part-owner of a Melbourne Cup runner.
Having called the Cup over four decades for radio and television, Bryan will be at Flemington on Tuesday – but this time with a runner of his own in the shape of Adelaide Cup winner Daqiansweet Junior. Bryan’s Beartown Syndicate are part-owners of the Phillip Stokes-trained five-year-old with OTI Racing and others.
Looking back, it was chance and happenstance that got the man who was to become Australia’s premier race caller interested in racing. There was not a great deal of racing history in the family - though Bryan’s mum would go to the Oaks each year, his dad showed little interest but on that fateful day 66 years ago he decided to enter his family in their street's Cup sweep.
Bryan drew Evening Peal. As that mare held off a late charge from the star stayer Redcraze, Bryan was cheering and racing was gaining a new fan. He had two bob in his pocket and couldn't wait to get to the track to experience this thrill live.
After that, he and brother Ken would get to as many race meetings as they could, sitting on the steeplechasing fences on the infield as horses thundered past. “I heard that rumble on the track and just thought: ‘Wow! This is so good!’” he recalls.
On the days he could not get to the track, Bryan would be listening in and by the early 1960s he could be seen calling races as his friends sprinted around the oval as he allotted them names of the famous racehorses of the time. Picture the scene ... “and Tulloch takes the lead as Even Stevens runs out wide!”
After a brief stint in a stable, Bryan's riding aspirations were soon foiled – “the trainer told me my feet were too big!” – and after three weeks he set his sights elsewhere. To radio, to be precise.
Kicking off as a mailboy at 3AW, he was afforded the opportunity to call a major race on the final day of the 1966 Melbourne Cup carnival as part of a local competition, which he won. “I was on my way,” he says.
Four years later Bryan secured his first calling job in Adelaide and it was there, living just down the road from Morphettville racecourse, that he first felt the urge to race a horse. Thus with a couple of mates, each of them putting in A$50 each, they splurged A$150 on a yearling. But it was hardly an auspicious start, the horse being described as “too slow to race”.
Working for Melbourne radio and television stations throughout the next four decades before his retirement in 2017, Bryan says he felt privileged to call 29 Melbourne Cups. Throughout this time he continued to own horses, enjoying each of his wins wherever they were. However, one of his horses stood tall above the others: Fields Of Omagh, the horse who "took us on a magic carpet ride”.
Running in five Cox Plates and winning two of them (including his memorable finale), Fields Of Omagh also took his place in a Caulfield Cup (second to the champion Northerly) and numerous other big races while also running in Dubai, Hong Kong and Japan.
But Fields Of Omagh was not a stayer and so the Melbourne Cup is that one race Bryan has not experienced as an owner – until this year with Daqiansweet Junior, who won the Adelaide Cup under Jamie Kah.
Running syndicates since the 1990s, Bryan had noted that OTI Racing's Terry Henderson had been sourcing very nice horses and he wanted to be a part of it. “Terry and I go back a long time, we went to school together,” he explains.
“I approached him with the idea of involving our syndicates. We started with a couple and now we are in 37 of their horses.”
These include recent stakes winner Regal Lion and stakes-placed Lady Laguna, horses who have given Bryan another taste of big-race involvement running in the ATC Derby and Golden Slipper.
But as big as those races are, they are not the Melbourne Cup, where having a runner is a dream come true, one he will be sharing with all of his family including his brother who flies down from Queensland to once again be at his racing side.
It also marks the culmination of a lifetime’s involvement in racing. “It has been a huge trip,” says Martin. “I remember the nights before the Cups, I wouldn't be able to sleep. I'd be awake at 2am playing out all the scenarios. It never got any easier but I did have that element of control – it was up to me how I called it. But with this it is all out of your hands.”
‘Lunar Flare is an absolute darling now’
Grahame Begg trainer of Lunar Flare
Grahame Begg knows what it is like to train a G1 winner – he has cheered home 15 of them since taking over his legendary father Neville's Randwick stables back in 1990.
As Neville continued to train winners in Hong Kong, Grahame was forging his own career with his first taste of elite-level success coming in the 1990 Doomben Cup won by Eye Of The Sky.
Many top-class horses made their way through the Begg stables from thereon and, after winning a number of Sydney's major races, he relocated (after a 18-month break) to Victoria six years ago.
It did not take long for the younger Begg to make his mark on Melbourne, winning the city's biggest juvenile feature, the Blue Diamond Stakes, in 2018 with Written By. Now a resident at Widden Stud, that handsome and classy chestnut was bred by Neville Begg and is a son of the 2020-21 Australian champion sire Written Tycoon, who was also trained by Grahame.
Yet while here are lots of great moments to reflect upon, there is a significant omission from the Begg trophy shelf – the Melbourne Cup.
Moreover, he has never even had a runner in Australia’s greatest race – not even, he says, having had many horses who have even looked a chance of getting to the Cup. In fact, the closest he has got was the 1993 AJC Oaks winner Mahaya (auntie to the star galloper Lonhro) who just didn't come up that spring.
Mind you, there are however a couple of links to Cup history in the Begg family. Neville didn't manage a placegetter with his couple of runners but as an apprentice jockey he did his time with trainer Maurice McCarten and was with the stable when they scored in 1951 with Delta.
Then in 1974 the previous year's Cup winner Gala Supreme stayed at the Begg stables for his Sydney Cup campaign, providing a young Grahame with his first memory of the big race. "I was just a kid, but I knew what a Melbourne Cup winner was!” he grins.
Fast forward 48 years and Begg is putting the very final touches on the campaign of his classy mare Lunar Flare who attempts to become only the third Melbourne Cup winner by a Melbourne Cup winner, her imported sire Fiorente having provided Gai Waterhouse with her Cup in 2013.
Even after decades of training, Begg admits that he still “gets a bit toey” on raceday and he is expecting a fair amount of nervousness to set in come Tuesday, saying: “It is obviously very exciting – especially as we are going into the race with a live chance. She has had a trouble-free preparation and has run well in all the key lead-up races."
A homebred forowners Mojo Thoroughbreds, Lunar Flare came to Begg as an out-of-form four-year-old in early 2020. Although she had won a mile maiden, she had not managed a place in four subsequent outings.
Heeding the owner's warnings that she'd been a little ‘hot’ – she needed to be broken in twice – Begg took his time and since then Lunar Flare has steadily been working her way through the classes. That said, the Melbourne Cup was not on the agenda until wins last spring in the Listed Harry White Stakes over 2400m and the G2 Moonee Valley Gold Cup over 2600m.
Everything Lunar Flare has done since has been pointing her in the direction of next Tuesday’s race – and, having won the G3 Lexus Bart Cummings at Flemington on October 1, she looks nicely on track for the big one off her fast-finishing second last weekend in this year’s Moonee Valley Gold Cup.
“She’s an absolute darling now,” says Begg. “Her owners are very excited – my dad, my wife Sue as well – I am trying to keep her feet on the ground!”
• Visit the VRC website and the Grahame Begg website
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