Point Of Law won the 166th Melbourne Cup at Flemington on Tuesday in only its sixth start, running down the long-time leader Royal Supremacy with 150 metres of the 3,200 left.
The horse was bred in England and sired by the unbeaten Frankel, and was owned by King Charles III before being sold earlier this year to an Australian consortium, following a win in the Group 3 Bahrain Trophy at Newmarket. Among its new owners is the former Australian rules footballer Chris Judd.
Ridden by Ethan Brown, who comes from Alice Springs, Point Of Law firmed as favourite shortly before the start, taking that tag from Hopewell Rock. It is the fourth horse to win the Geelong Cup and the Melbourne Cup in the same year.
Its trainer, Ciaron Maher, had seven runners in the race, a record for a trainer in the Melbourne Cup: Middle Earth, Royal Supremacy, Juja Kibo, Zahrann, Point Of Law, Mr Monaco and Shockletz.
Zahrann, ridden by Ben Melham, finished second. Juja Kibo, ridden by Sam Clipperton, finished third. Maher became the first trainer in the history of the race to train the trifecta, and had five of the first six home, with Royal Supremacy fifth and Shockletz sixth.
It is Maher's second Melbourne Cup, after Gold Trip in 2022. He went on to win the last race of the day with Fundamental Nature.
Twenty-three horses ran. The Irish trainer Joseph O'Brien had five of them, which meant that between them Maher and O'Brien accounted for just over half the field. Maher is a leading proponent of the Australian strategy of importing stayers: of his seven, only Shockletz, bred in New Zealand, was anything close to local, the rest coming from Britain or Ireland.
It is worth being exact about the arithmetic of the finish. One stable supplied seven of the twenty-three horses, and those seven filled first, second, third, fifth and sixth.
This newspaper congratulates Mr Maher on a historic result and raises the narrower question of who was beaten. Second place was beaten by the yard that trained it. So was third. So were fifth and sixth, twice over.
The handicapper's work is organised around horses. Weight is allocated to each animal according to its form, and that is the mechanism by which a field of twenty-three is made competitive over two miles. Nothing in the weights is allocated to a stable, because a stable does not carry it.
That leaves the only entity with seven runners in the race entirely unhandicapped, and it is the entity that finished first, second and third. The horses were weighted against one another. The yard was weighted against nobody.
Royal Supremacy led for most of the distance and was run down by a horse from its own stable. The rules of racing treat that as two runners. The stable treats it as a plan, laid some months earlier, which arrived in the order intended.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has written to Racing Victoria on the single point the record does not settle. The trifecta is paid to the punter who correctly names the first three horses home; where all three come from one yard, the Department would like to know whether the bet was a prediction or an introduction.