1. Current Cranbourne trainer and former champion jockey Pat Hyland won the 1985 Melbourne Cup on What A Nuisance for Lloyd Williams, the second of the leviathan owner’s five cup winners. In a riding career spanning more than three decades, Hyland rode 2382 winners – including all of the ‘big four’ – the Melbourne Cup, Caulfield Cup, Cox Plate and Golden Slipper. What A Nuisance was retired to Hyland’s Clyde property and died in April 2005 at the age of 26.
2. The local connection to the Melbourne Cup goes back to the first race meeting held in Cranbourne over two days in April 1867, when an aged gelding named Toryboy won the feature Cranbourne Handicap over 3218 metres. Toryboy had run fifth in Archer’s first Melbourne Cup in 1961, sixth to the same horse the following years and, having missed the ’63 and ’64 cups, was officially considered ‘aged’ when he lined up at Flemington again in 1865 and duly won what was to become Australia’s most famous race as a despised outsider, netting a fortune for his owner, Prahran draper B.C. Marshall.
3. Jack Holt was Australia’s most successful trainer in the early part of the last century – considered the Bart Cummings of his era – and won the 1933 Melbourne Cup with Hall Mark. Holt trained for most of his career out of the old Epsom track and became known as ‘The Wizard of Mordialloc’, but he grew up in Berwick and actually started his training career on the old Beaconsfield racecourse. Holt won the Victorian trainer’s premiership 13 times in the 17 seasons from 1919 to 1935 and won every major race in Melbourne and Sydney, many on multiple occasions.
