Today is the day of The Race that Stops a Nation. That’s right folks, it’s Melbourne Cup Day. All my Australian readers will be well aware of this fact, it’s practically impossible to miss the hype, the constant discussions about The Favourite, The Weather and hats, and the plans your workplace has been making for weeks now for The Cup Lunch. All this, in honour of a horse race.
Because there’s loads of information about the Melbourne Cup available online, I won’t go into too much detail. Wikipedia provides a lot of facts about the race: “Australia’s major annual thoroughbred horse race“, held on the first Tuesday every November since 1861 in Melbourne, at the Flemington Racecourse. Some women seem to consider attendance at the Cup, dressed in the fanciest or most outlandish gear they can find, complete with hat, to be a compulsory annual event.
At Work today many will attend lunch in our dingy staff room. We’ll eat Red Rooster or quiche (for the vegetarians) and crowd around a small tv and watch with bated breath when the horses run. It’ll all be over far too quickly. If you happen to pick the right name from a hat you might win a small sum of money. I wonder if anyone will bother to wear a hat…
I must confess that I don’t quite understand the fervour with which some so many Australians celebrate Cup Day. I mean, it’s a HORSE RACE, people. I suppose I don’t like dressing up and generally tend to avoid large crowds. We were talking about this at work yesterday and I was hoping JW with her x-generations of Irish Australian antecedents would be able to shed some light on it but instead the conversation degenerated into a discussion of the strong anti-intellectual streak in Australian culture. (We were also talking about the relaxed nature of primary school education in this country - Anna, you recently discussed this too.)
I suppose I will just watch and learn and continue to be amused by Australia’s love of sport in any form. Are sporting events celebrated as national events in other countries?
EDIT 12:34pm, after the race: I have to laugh at myself. Despite being all I’m-quite-above-all-this-kerfuffle this morning, I was amused at how much I wanted Makybe Diva to win when the race finally started and I was sitting in the staff room surrounded by colleagues and eating my Red Rooster and quiche. It was a great finish and a great win (although I am probably going to get annoyed by all the comparisons to Phar Lap in the next few days).
Categories: Melbourne Cup, Melbourne, Australia, sport, culture
