Thirty years since Dermot Weld’s horse and jockey Michael Kinane proved Cummings and the rest of the doubters’ wrong, the veteran Irish trainer’s eyes still light up when he recalls that first Tuesday in November in 1993.
It started with a young Irish boy and a book of bush poetry and ended up changing horse racing forever.
“I didn’t realise how true my words would become. Back then people tended to be happy to stay within their own continents, be they America, Europe or Australia and compete at home.” “Most people in both Ireland and Australia thought we were mad to try it at the time. The locals gave us no chance. The main reason being the six-week gap or whatever it was since Vintage Crop’s last run,” Weld, perched on a wooden bench at the famed Tattersall’s horse sales at Newmarket, tells this masthead.“Great trainers like Bart Cummings, who I got to know well, and I appreciated very much his genius, he dismissed our chance completely.
There had been international entries for the holy grail of Southern Hemisphere racing in the years before 1993, including Vintage Crop in 1992, yet none ever travelled. Quarantine requirements were too strict, while planes carrying horses were forced to take a route that made a marathon journey even more arduous.
Weld credits both Bourke and Les Benton, then VRC racing manager, with getting those changes implemented in time for the 1993 running. He praised the work of the Department of Agriculture in Canberra too, working in conjunction with the equivalent European Union departments in Brussels.
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