When it’s Melbourne Cup day, Australians celebrate in one of many ways: go to Flemington to watch the famous race, attend a local race meeting throughout the country, turn the televisions on at school for kids, host a barbecue or even just a good old-fashioned pub crawl.
In 2001, the late trainer Bede Murray thought he had a big chance of winning the Melbourne Cup with Universal Prince. Murray was a devotee of the race, and even when he didn’t have a runner, would still travel to Flemington to watch from the grandstands. This was supposed to be his time.
But after a battery of vet checks on race morning, Universal Prince was scratched. There’s a famous old photo of Murray throwing his hands in the air and running behind his star stayer during the trot up, desperately hoping to spark an action that would satisfy his assessors.
It didn’t work.
The rest of the day was akin to having a wake filmed for a reality television show.
“It was like the paparazzi was following us,” Bede’s son Paul Murray recalls.
“The morning he got scratched, we said we would meet at such-and-such a place. When we got there, cameramen were just following us everywhere. We thought, ‘stuff this, we’re not sitting here all day. We’ll go somewhere else’. Everywhere we went, they seemed to find us.
“It was just a nightmare in the end.”
In the end, Murray and co watched the race at Melbourne’s Emerald Hotel. The photo of him staring blankly at the screen showing Ethereal’s win was almost as poignant as anything taken on track.
No one knows how Universal Prince would have gone in the Melbourne Cup if he was passed fit, particularly after he beat only three home in the Mackinnon Stakes a few days earlier. But the Murrays were insistent the horse would be peaking on Cup day after several eye-catching runs earlier in the spring.
“We got told if he won the Melbourne Cup, the bookmakers were going to lose $100 million,” Paul Murray says. “We don’t know how true it is, but that’s what we were told.
“I think that was the start of Dad’s cancer as it knocked him around really bad. He thought he could win the Melbourne Cup. He was just gutted after that. He was that good of a horse. We never saw the best of him because he retired.”
Universal Prince won an Australian Derby, the Spring Champion Stakes and a Ranvet Stakes, but his legacy will always be the Melbourne Cup morning scratching and the race that got away.
Bede – the trainer of other stars such as gun two-year-old Victory Vein who was only a narrow second in the Golden Slipper away from winning the triple crown, Half Hennessy, Coniston Bluebird and Darci Be Good – would eventually die 15 years later in 2016.
A dairy farmer by trade, Murray stumbled into horse training on the lush green hills of the New South Wales South Coast having been convinced by a mate to head to Sydney and buy a horse. He’d already taken an interest in horse racing at the local shows, the so-called “Number Nine” meetings, unregulated racing thus named because of the number nine-shaped courses.
One purchase turned into two and two turned into three and then it was a full-scale operation where his sons Paul and Graeme gave up their rugby league pursuits to join a business which expanded to Kembla Grange, the training hub in Wollongong 90 minutes south of Sydney.
Kembla is more blue collar than blueblood; its highest profile trainers have always been the Murray family dynasty, the late Gwenda Markwell and Kerry Parker. All preferred the company of their horses and a stable broom rather than wooing owners over lunch. The streets where the stables are built drip with history: Phar Lap Avenue, Kingston Town Drive, Manikato Place. The moment you turn into the area, you know it’s a horse haven.
One of the horses emerging as potentially the best of her generation at Kembla would be making Bede beam watching down.
Paul’s own career has been a successful one, enjoying a love of bush carnivals just as much as his father, and having been to the top level with Predatory Pricer and Alma’s Fury.
The latter also caused heartache when he was found to have elevated cobalt levels in a post-race sample. Stewards came down hard on Murray at the same time bigger trainers including Black Caviar’s conditioner Peter Moody, Mark Kavanagh, Danny O’Brien and Darren Smith were all entangled in the cobalt net. Murray pleaded not guilty to the charges, but was eventually disqualified.
Sidelined, Murray lent on his working class roots, picked up the tools and began working with a crew that was building a new highway bypass just down the road from Kembla Grange. One day, standing by the side of the road he realised what he wanted to do when his time was up.
“I thought I was hard done by, and everyone was really,” Murray says.
“Don’t get me wrong, I loved what I was doing with the fencing and building the highway at Albion Park. I learned a lot while I was away from racing, but it’s in your blood. I tuned in every day to watch races and lucky I had a phone so I could watch them while I was working. It’s never out of your blood once it’s in there.”
A couple of years ago, Murray and partner Michelle Ritchie, a trainer in her own right, decided to give it one last crack. They bought 10 yearlings and while their stable size is nowhere near what it was when Bede was alive – “it’s like we’re semi-retired” – it only takes one good horse to take you on a magic carpet.
Where’s The Circus doesn’t have the pedigree to suggest she should be contesting races like Saturday’s A$2 million Inglis Millennium at Royal Randwick, a key lead-up to the Golden Slipper. Murray and Ritchie trained two horses out of her family: Can’t Find Snippy and Where’s Snippy. They liked the fillies from the lineage, not so much the colts.
When a couple of their owners from Can’t Find Snippy noticed the horse’s half-sister was entered for an online sale, they urged Paul and Ritchie to have a look. They paid a miserly A$1250 to secure her. On debut, she won the Inglis Nursery at huge odds, banking A$231,000 for connections.
“The interesting thing is when we bought her home, we’d never see her run or trot around,” Paul says. “She would just walk around the paddock everywhere. She wouldn’t run or do anything. We thought, ‘what have we bought here?’ We kept laughing about it.
“Then we sent her to the breakers and they said, ‘she’s doing everything right’. We’d never done much with her because Michelle doesn’t like pushing babies.”
Where’s The Circus will keep the Murrays going, including Graeme who looks after the family property and the stable’s spellers, for a bit longer. Horses trade paddock life for stable time at Kembla, and they’re still yet to find a better method than the coastal, rolling green hills south of Sydney.
“Michelle wants me to retire tomorrow,” Paul laughs. “We can’t do this for the rest of our lives. We’ve got to enjoy them a little bit. But when you’ve got a good horse, you don’t know where it’s going to take you. It’s in your blood. If I did retire, we’d probably have one or two for a bit of a hobby and that’s it.”
That would allow for plenty of drinking time at the pub too, without the paparazzi on their tail as well. ∎
