OH WHAT A KNIGHT!

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Rank outsider Knight’s Choice (Extreme Choice) etched his name into Australian folklore when running out a shock winner of Tuesday’s Melbourne Cup (Gr 1, 3200m) at Flemington and in the process provided Newgate Farm resident Extreme Choice (Not A Single Doubt) with his fourth Group 1 winner.

Leaving plenty of onlookers stunned at what had just unfolded in front of them, the $91 chance delivered a second Melbourne Cup win for Sheila Laxon, after Ethereal (Rhythm) in 2001, and a first for her training partner John Symons.

Steered home by Robbie Dolan, the gelded five-year-old burrowed his way between rivals down the home straight and, once hitting the front inside the final 150 metres, held out on the bob to beat Japanese raider Warp Speed (Drefong) by 0.1 lengths. 

Ironically, the front two had finished next to each other in last month’s Caulfield Cup (Gr 1, 2400m), with Knight’s Choice running 14th at three-figure odds while Warp Speed finished one place in front of his old rival on that occasion in 13th place.

The front pair pulled a further 0.8 lengths clear of the third-placed Okita Soushi (Galileo), with Zardozi (Kingman) in fourth and Absurde (Fastnet Rock), who was improving on his seventh-placed effort in the race 12 months ago, was back in fifth.

With his $91 success, Knight’s Choice became the fifth-highest-priced winner of the Melbourne Cup, following $101 roughies The Pearl (New Warrior) (1871), Wotan (Siegfried) (1936), Old Rowley (The Buzzard) (1940) and Prince Of Penzance (Pentire) (2015).

“It’s incredible. I just can’t believe it. I don’t even know what to say,” Dolan, whose father, Bobby Dolan, was also a jockey in Ireland, said. “I can’t even put it into words. This is the biggest race in the world, and to win it is just incredible.

“I’ve got my family here, my partner, Christine, our little baby, Masie. My dad flew over from Ireland, and now you got me in tears.

“I watched every Melbourne Cup over the last 40 years the other night. I just thought my best chance is if I get him to stay the trip and hopefully he can rattle home and quicken up them, good sectionals that he can do on a good track, and he just proved everybody wrong.”

Dolan was having his first-ever ride in the race, and was quick to pay tribute to both Laxon and Symons.

“I’ve never ridden this race before, so I didn’t know what to expect, but I feel like I’ve ridden it ten times because I’ve run the race over in my head before I got here. It panned out exactly as I thought it would,” he said.

“I thought I’d be a pair closer, but they went quick. I just rode him for luck because I know he’s got a good turn of foot. What a training performance.

“There wasn’t enough room for me to come outside. So I decided to cut the corner. I heard Kerrin [McEvoy, Absurde] giving me a call along the inside. I initially would have gone for the run that he went for.

“He was going a little bit better than me. Once my horse spotted the gap and he sort of changed leads, and he just sort of picked up on me. Once I pulled the stick through, he found another gear again. He’s only a small little horse, but he gives his all every start, and that’s half the battle with him, I think and he’s proved a lot of people wrong.

“You can’t do it without the trainers like Sheila and John. They were so confident in this horse even before he got to this race and a lot of people doubted them. To be honest, I didn’t. I really liked his run the other day at Bendigo. He hit the line really well and was unlucky not to be placed.”

Dolan revealed that meeting Laxon had been something of a moment of fate, in an environment that not many would quite expect.

“We met on a P&O cruise, two years ago,” he revealed. “I was singing on a Melbourne Cup cruise and Sheila was there with the Melbourne Cup, and here we are, we’ve won the Melbourne Cup.”

Bred by Norm Bazeley’s Elswick Stud out of the More Than Ready (Southern Halo) mare Midnight Pear, who Bazeley purchased for just $1,000 at the Inglis Great Southern Bloodstock and Weanling Sale in 2013, Knight’s Choice only made his debut as a three-year-old, winning four-in-a-row at the end of that season, including the Winx Guineas (Gr 3, 1600m), prompting connections to be offered $2.7 million for the gelding.

Having batted that offer away, the ownership would likely have been slightly ruing that decision prior to Tuesday’s phenomenal success, with Knight’s Choice having scored on just a sole occasion since that Group 3 win in July 2023, landing a 2000-metre handicap at Doomben on December 2, 2023. 

Placings in the Members’ Handicap (Listed, 1600m), Q22 (Gr 2, 2200m) and Tattersall’s Cup (Gr 3, 2400m) followed, while a fourth-placed effort in the Caloundra Cup (Listed, 2400m) on July 14 would have offered at least some hope for further black-type success this season.

 

Leading into the Cup, Knight’s Choice had run a rather unlucky fifth behind race rival Sea King (Sea The Stars) in the Bendigo Cup (Gr 3, 2400m), however it was nothing to suggest that connections could have expected a performance of this magnitude less than a week later.

“It was just an awesome and amazing ride by Robbie,” Laxon, who was the first woman to lift the Melbourne Cup as a trainer, said.

“We didn’t give him instructions, he just knew what to do. Obviously, when you win something like this, it takes a while to register. John is over the moon and the owners are just so thrilled. It’s great to be part of it.”

In winning Tuesday’s Group 1, Knight’s Choice became just the fourth Australian-bred horse to win the Melbourne Cup this century, joining Vow And Declare (Declaration Of War) (2019), Shocking (Street Cry) (2009) and Viewed (Scenic) (2008), while he is the first winner by an Australian-bred sire since Rogan Josh (Old Spice), who landed the race in 1999.

“Do you know what’s great? I love it being done for the Australians,” Laxon said. “The Australian horse has done it and Robbie’s Australian now as well. So I’m thrilled to win the Cup. It’s the people’s Cup and that’s what it’s all about.

“Cameron Bain and the people who raced Midnight Pearl – the mother have ten per cent as well. So it’s just a small group of people. They’re just so thrilled and so am I.

“The team has done a brilliant job while we’ve been away down here at Macedon Lodge. Thanks to everybody at Macedon Lodge and Leigh, Ricky and Mark Player for letting us stay there and Paul Cummings. They’ve really helped us and everybody’s been so good there. It’s thanks to a whole heap of people that we’ve got here today [Saturday].

“The magic of Macedon. It is an incredible place and I’m so glad that we’ve done this and been there and trained out of there. So fantastic.”

Laxon’s co-trainer Symons revealed that retirement had been spoken about should they pull off a magic Melbourne Cup win, however, now that the unlikely success has indeed come off, those talks may be put on hold for at least the foreseeable future.

“Some of the owners said they wanted us to finish off with us and I think we were up there for three months when we won a big race on Magic Millions Day and off to the yearling sales we went,” Symons said. 

“We’ve kept on going and people with us have pushed us to keep us going. We said if we could pull it off [winning the Melbourne Cup], we would think about it [retirement], but we have a couple of really, really nice young horses up there.” 

On his co-trainer and wife, Symons said: “Sheila’s a superstar. She’s been around the world. Romanee Conti, Ethereal’s mother, won the Hong Kong Cup. We’ve gelled from day one, we were both at Macedon Lodge, she came and stayed there with Ethereal, that’s where we met.

“To be able to do this is a dream come true. We thought it would probably slip through our fingers, but to be able to come back and do this, it’s just fantastic.”

Akira Sugawara, the rider of the second-placed horse Warp Speed, was understandably proud of his horse’s efforts to be narrowly defeated in a photo-finish.

“The plan was to go a bit more forward, but obviously he couldn’t,” he told Racing.com. “Then we just changed to Plan B, which was what we always had in mind. We watched many Melbourne Cups of the past, and we could come from the back. We got him into real rhythm, good rhythm and went through the field, and it was a really good run.”

Meanwhile, Jamie Kah, who rode the third horse Okita Soushi, felt the Ciaron Maher-trained entire just lacked a turn of pace inside the closing stages of the 3200-metre feature.

“Fantastic run,” the champion rider told Racing.com. “Couldn’t have asked for anything more from the horse. Got me a bit excited at the 200 [metre mark]. I thought he was going to hang on, but he’s just a genuine one-pace horse, but couldn’t ask for anything more of him.”

The Chris Waller-trained Buckaroo (Fastnet Rock) was sent off the $6 favourite following his fast-finishing second in the Caulfield Cup, but jockey Joao Moreira felt the gelding struggled to stay the two-mile trip.

“Didn’t have the best of the runs because he was actually too wide. It was hard to get in,” Moreira told Racing.com. “He had to travel a little bit wide. He still had cover, but the distance probably just stretched him too much, and the last little bit, he started getting tired. So, I’d say he couldn’t really run the distance.”

Knight’s Choice (5 g Extreme Choice – Midnight Pearl by More Than Ready) was purchased by Michael Kirby and Symons for $85,000 out of the Elswick Park draft at Book 2 of the 2021 Magic Millions Yearling Sale.

The gelding is the only winner out of Midnight Pearl, who was a seven-time winner on the track herself from 54 starts, including six of those for Laxon and Symons. She recently foaled a filly by The Autumn Sun (Redoute’s Choice) after having not had a foal in three years.

Knight’s Choice now has six victories from 23 outings, with a further five placings and over $5.8 million in prize-money, and was becoming the fourth individual Group 1 winner for Newgate Farm’s sprinter Extreme Choice (Not A Single Doubt), who is better known for producing sprinters. With Tuesday’s win he became the first stallion to sire the winner of the Golden Slipper (Gr 1, 1200m) and Melbourne Cup since the great Sir Tristram (Sir Ivor).