Twilight to carry Melbourne Cup top-weight

SONNYBOYLISTON and Twilight Payment head the weights for the Lexus Melbourne Cup, both having been allocated 58kgs.

With the former unlikely to make the trip, last year’s winner looks set to carry the number one saddlecloth. Sir Dragonet, the 2020 Cox Plate winner is the next best weighted at 57.5kgs; he holds top-weight at 58kgs for the Caulfield Cup.

A half-kilo behind him in the Melbourne Cup, with 57kgs, is the Prix Ganay runner-up Gold Trip who is entered as a starter for the Ciaron Maher and David Eustace stable. Saturday’s Makybe Diva Stakes winner, Incentivise may have shown his hand a few days too early with Chief Handicapper Greg Carpenter admitting his Group 1 win forced a response that resulted in an allocation of 55.5kgs for both Cups.

“With complete frankness, had he not run on Saturday, we probably would have landed around 53.5kg,” said Carpenter on how he was viewing Incentivise.

Difficult to access

“Not every year, but some years you get a horse that emerges very rapidly from the midst and enters our main handicap features and is a very, very difficult horse to assess. What weight that he was going to get if he won it all depended on the way he won it and the horses in the finish. Irrespective of the margin, it was an enormously impressive win. The weight that he has got (55.5kg) has definitely been impacted by the Makybe Diva win on Saturday.”

The remaining Internationally trained horses are headed by the Andrew Balding-trained Spanish Mission at 57kgs, Ismail Mohammed’s Away He Goes at 54.5kgs, Master Of Reality for Joseph O’Brien at 54kgs and David Simcock’s Rodrigo Diaz with 51kgs.

Two former Joseph O’Brien-trained horses managed by Lloyd Williams, Buckhurst and Dawn Patrol have been weighted at 54kgs and 53kgs respectively for the Melbourne Cup.