The seed for Weld’s Melbourne Cup dream was sewn years before while working as a vet in Australia for the legendary late TJ Smith.
“I realised the importance of the Melbourne Cup to Australia and of course I believed that I might be fortunate enough to train a horse that would be good enough to one day win the Melbourne Cup, but I realised that was going to be a huge challenge, nobody had done it before,” he said.
For a year before Vintage Crop’s first appearance in Melbourne, Weld worked behind the scenes to change the quarantine system.
“The amount of work that we had to put in to bring a horse to Australia that people nowadays couldn’t even begin to understand…of course you could bring horses or animals but they had to go in a quarantine facility in Sydney where they stayed for two weeks but they couldn’t exercise and naturally this was a racehorse preparing for a race we had to exercise him on a daily basis hence the reason that everything had to change.
“So, we spent the next year with Canberra, Departments of Agriculture in Ireland, Brussels, we went through all the different possibilities and changed the flight paths of aeroplanes, changed the quarantine to Sandown and the rest is history.”
Weld also reflected on his other Cup success with Media Puzzle, and his near miss with Vinnie Roe in 2004.
“Vinnie Roe, he ran second to Makybe Diva, he was probably the best horse I brought that didn’t win a Melbourne Cup, but she was an exceptional mare. Media Puzzle and Vinnie Roe they both ran superb races for me,” he said.
“They were both wonderful occasions. Whenever your fortunate to win a Melbourne Cup it’s a great occasion, and with all the excitement and the drama of the first one, that it couldn’t be done, I remember the great trainer Bart Cummings in an interview before the race saying you know Vintage Crop he hadn’t raced for six weeks and this was unheard of in Australia and he’d never been over the distance and all the different reasons why he couldn’t win. But Bart and I became very good friends, and we made up.
“And then of course with the sad tragedy of Damien losing his brother the week before the race and nobody knew if he was going to ride Media Puzzle or not. He’d ridden him for me and he won the Geelong Cup and naturally I wanted him to ride him in the Melbourne Cup. The tragedy happened and I waited and when I landed in Melbourne at your airport all the media wanted to know who was going to ride the favourite in the Melbourne Cup. Was it going to be an Australian jockey, was it going to be a European jockey? An Irish jockey? An English jockey? And I said no, let’s wait, let’s wait and see what Damien wants to do…give the man time and hopefully he may yet decide to ride. Damien fortunately watched that interview and he said afterwards that decided it for him.
“Both Melbourne Cups were very special.”
Weld, one of Ireland’s most successful racehorse trainers, said he was hopeful to one day return to Flemington with another Cup runner.
“I would love to come back for another one, definitely. We’re working on it, I’ll put it that way!”
