Mick Robins – the oldest member of an exclusive club
The list of living Australian-based Melbourne Cup-winning trainers is a relatively short one. An exclusive club, no less, and one which is becoming harder to join.
Perhaps that’s no surprise given that three men – Bart Cummings (12), Lee Freedman (5) and George Hanlon (3) – won almost half the Cups between 1965 and 2008.
And, since then, overseas trainers have regularly supplied almost half the Cup runners. Danny O’Brien is the only member of the club to be represented this year (although I’m sure Anthony Freedman could legitimately claim to have had some hand in the winners officially trained by his brother Lee).
The list, indeed, numbers just 15 including four who were New Zealand-born although Graeme Rogerson’s inclusion – alongside Brian Jenkins, Mike Moroney and Sheila Laxon – as the nominated trainer of Efficient is open to debate.
Moroney, of course, is still going strong; Laxon is training in partnership with John Symons in Queensland while Jenkins abandoned training to focus on the development of his revolutionary racing bit “Triabit”.
The remaining 11 are last year’s winner O’Brien, the only trainer currently in Australia to have won the Caulfield and Melbourne Cups and the Cox Plate; two-time winner Robert Hickmott; the now disqualified Darren Weir; Gai Waterhouse; Mark Kavanagh; John Meagher, who’s training again in partnership with son Chris; plus David Hayes and David Hall, who are in Hong Kong, and Freedman, who’s in Singapore.
Plus two more. Two very remarkable figures – Les Bridge and Mick Robins. Bridge, at 82, won this year’s Everest with Classique Legend. He won the Cup in 1987 with Kensei. It was the first year he’d had a Cup runner.
That was also the case for Robins, now 90, when he saddled up Rain Lover (Latin Lover) in 1968. He won the Cup with 51.5 kilograms and returned, to win it again 12 months later, with 60.5 kilograms – horse and trainer becoming the first to win back-to-back Cups since Archer, trained by five times Cup winner Etienne De Mestre, won the first two in 1861-62.
Only Think Big (Cummings) and Makybe Diva (Freedman) have achieved that feat since, so only the three most successful trainers in Melbourne Cup history and Robins have managed successive Cup wins with the same horse.
Robins turned 90 in July this year and is the oldest living Melbourne Cup-winning trainer. His story is a remarkable one which he first told to me, at length, more than 20 years ago. Parts of it have resurfaced this year in interviews with John Tapp and Michael Felgate. It’s worth re-telling.
Robins, now living in Nhill, was born and raised in Broken Hill. His working life began as an apprentice butcher before “triple the pay”, as he recalled it, drew him “1,600 feet underground in the mines for six and a half years”.
He rode in Corinthian (amateur, highlights) races as a teenager. “I was no Roy Higgins but had some winners,” he said. He secured a trainer’s licence in 1952 but was, by his own admission, a hobby trainer with four or five horses.
“My experience with horses in Broken Hill wasn’t really a great qualification so I was lucky to get a job with Grahame Heagney in Adelaide,” he said.
That move, in 1962, followed his wife Valda’s desire to move to be closer to family – one which Robins could only abide if he found a job with horses and which followed a knockback from Cummings whom he had approached two years earlier.
“I knew him (Cummings) to say g’day to but, at the time, he said he just didn’t have any vacancies. When I finished up winning the Cup in ’68, he was the first person to congratulate me and said ‘good on you son’ even though he was only two years older than me,” he said.
“Then he said, ‘I should’ve given you that job’. I said ‘anyone can train a good horse’ and, as he shook my hand, he said ‘don’t ever say that son’.”
Heagney, later admitted to the Racing Australia Hall of Fame, was among the leading trainers in Adelaide but still on the rise and Robins’ timing was impeccable.
“The year after I arrived, Grahame won the Melbourne Cup with Gatum Gatum and I thought ‘gee, this is pretty good’. And then the following year in comes Tobin Bronze who turns out to be one of the greatest horses ever to race in Australia,” he said.
And there, in a sense, truly begins the story – notwithstanding that Robins had assisted in breaking in Rain Lover while working for Heagney. Tobin Bronze was sold to two American businessmen before he won the Caulfield Cup and Cox Plate in 1967 (he’d also won the latter in 1966).
It was always their intention to take him to the States and they were keen for Heagney to go with him, to help him settle into a new environment, before training legend Charlie Whittingham would eventually take over the reins.
In Heagney’s absence, Robins took over the training of 14 of the stable’s 30 horses and they included Rain Lover. “I had confidence in myself to do the job but I admit it was a bit worrying coming to Melbourne which was strange ground. I’d been to Flemington before but not to a Melbourne Cup,” he said.
Rain Lover completed his Cup preparation in the Mackinnon Stakes just as a Cummings-trained stayer would then do. Cummings’ first three Cup winners had come in the three previous years and each – Light Fingers, Galilee and Red Handed – ran in the Mackinnon. Rain Lover won it…and the Fisher Plate on final day, beating Fileur on each occasion and also in the Cup.
“I was definitely influenced by Bart. I never really talked to him about training but I used to watch him a lot in Adelaide. He’d feed ‘em harder and work ‘em lighter than other trainers,” Robins recalled when I first wrote of his Cup triumphs.
Cummings had three runners in that 1968 Cup but none to match Rain Lover who, with Jim Johnson aboard, won by eight lengths in then record time. Rain Lover then ran second in the 1969 Sydney Cup, conceding almost six kilograms to the winner Lowland, and won the Melbourne Cup narrowly from Alsop to whom he conceded almost 14 kilograms.
Robins says that Lee Freedman, then 12, told him he went to Randwick on that Sydney Cup day “just to take photos of Rain Lover”.
Rain Lover won 17 races before he was retired in 1970. He lived until he was 24 before dying of cancer of the lymph gland; the same disease which took Robins’ wife Valda, whom he’d nursed for almost ten years, in 1988.
After a break from racing through that time, Robins returned to work for trainer Greg Mance – who died in October after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease – and Robins saddled up Mance’s 1989 Caulfield Cup winner Cole Diesel. Says he got a better sling for that than winning the Melbourne Cup. He would later assist and mentor Mornington trainer Tony Noonan for many years.
Sounding as sprightly as ever in on-air interviews this year, Robins puts it down to horses and hard work. “The horses make a big difference…you’re always up early and working all day. Keeps you on your toes,” he said.