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Who will win the Melbourne Cup?
The latest expert tips from racing veteran Michael Lynch.
PT2M1S 620 349Such a fine early Tuesday morning, the sun pouring from a cloudless sky and Melbourne - why, all of Australia, surely - pouring to Flemington.
You needed to be nowhere near Flemington to know what was afoot.
Melbourne Cup 2014: Celebrities mingle in the Birdcage
Famous faces in the plush marquees. Photo: Getty
Three gleaming white cruise ships lay alongside Station Pier at Melbourne.
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One hundred and thirty buses lined up, and 6000 passengers tottered down the gangplanks, all hats and springtime colours, giggles and voyagers in suits, their thirst building.
Melbourne is on holiday for the Melbourne Cup, but a sort of annual spring hysteria regulates no sleeping in.
The Cup itself may be run mid-afternoon, but the trains snake out to Flemington early, packed, the roads fill, choppers flutter back and forth from the pad at Crown and you'd be a mad optimist to imagine you'd be able to catch a cab to anywhere but the track.
There are, of course, mad optimists everywhere. Names of horses drop from lips in the morning; worthless betting slips drop from disappointed hands in the afternoon. There's a statue of Bart Cummings just outside the betting ring, and young men line up to touch it and take selfies with it. The luck might rub off.
The queues from trains to ticket-booth by mid-morning are all but halted by the sheer mass of racegoers near crazed by the desire to get in among the flowered grounds.
They wish to promenade in their outfits - see the lady with a swan upon her head! - and find a bar and maybe even see a race.
The blessed stream to the Birdcage to sip champagne and twirl and kiss the air. Molly Meldrum sits in a multi-hued waistcoat on the top deck of the Emirates marquee, television cameras jostling before him. Here is proof there is life after near-death on this fine spring morning.
The less blessed line up at the bars. Frozen cocktails, yes! And it is not yet midday. There will be sleeping on the lawns a little later.
And there goes Premier Denis Napthine, a horse man but in greater need of hands to grasp than gallopers to watch. There is an election and he's in a hurry, his entourage hustling to keep in step, knowing the pretender, Daniel Andrews, is almost certainly lurking about, possibly grasping more hands, galloping himself, out in the lead.
Back at the Birdcage the air-kissing is frozen mid-air. Ronnie Wood has tweeted he's looking forward to the Melbouren Cup. Great Gods, there's a stage at one of the marquees and someone says there have been sound checks going on. Could the Rolling Stones be marching to Flemington to jam?
At the Birdcage, no one can remember the name of a horse. It's the Melbourne Cup, and the world's most famous rock 'n' roll band might come! Could life on a spring day be any more exciting, even if the sun has been pushed away by clouds?
At Flemington, no one admits to a cloud in the sky on Melbourne Cup Day.