WHEN Michael Kinane combined with Dermot Weld to win the Melbourne Cup, 30 years to the day on Thursday just gone, he knew it was an enormous achievement but the full extent of that enormity didn’t dawn on him until he walked into the reception area of his hotel the following morning.

Slightly worse for wear after a grand evening of celebration, Kinane was expecting to get out to the airport and make his way home, but was greeted with half the media in Melbourne, which incorporated television crews, lights and microphones.

“Everybody wanted to talk to me,” he told the story this week, laughing. “It was an amazing experience at the time but maybe only then I realised just how much the race meant to the Australian people.”

It was a watershed moment in the world of flat racing, a success that paved the way for other overseas competitors to take on the race that stops the nation. Here you had a horse from little old Ireland swooping in to claim the Cup. You can understand why the local media couldn’t get enough of it.

“It took them more than a year, probably a year and a half, to piece the journey together,” Kinane recalls of the preparation now. “We were planning to go a year previous but the lads weren’t able to piece it together, between the travel between countries, quarantines in different countries. Air travel for horses wasn’t the norm and you went a long way around the world at those times.

“It took a lot of planning. It was great from Dermot and Les Benton from Racing Victoria; they both put in a lot of work to make it happen. It took them a year and a half to piece it together so that’ll show you. Now it’s very different - planes are going everywhere with horses.”

Kinane himself came in from Japan on the day before the race. He walked the track quietly, met some media and recalls how Vintage Crop seemed to be written off by the local press. A hurdler surely couldn’t win the Cup.

As it transpired, the winds were for changing, in more ways than one. The weather in Melbourne was rotten - the perfect aid for the Irish St Leger winner’s acclimatisation. And while it may have been quite the mission getting Vintage Crop to Flemington, the race itself was all so straightforward.

“I got jammed up behind Frankie (Dettori, on Drum Taps) which was grand,” Kinane said. “I think I only had one either side of me and I knew I could trust Frankie to be doing the right thing so I was able to take my eyes off of him and focus on what was around me. It worked out pretty good and I knew Frankie was good enough to drag me into the race.

“The gaps came for me. The old advice was don’t move before the clock tower, which is at about the two pole, so that was around the time I let him loose and from that point, Te Akau Nick had taken up the lead, but I had loads of horse and I picked him up easily.

“Everyone was swept up in the enormity of it. It was a huge celebration and a lot went on in a short period of time. It was an unbelievable experience. I can remember waiting to come back in. The whole field has to wait until you come back. You go in first, the winner of the Melbourne Cup. Nobody goes into the parade ring ahead of you. It was fantastic.”

There have been three more Irish winners of the Melbourne Cup since, the first of which was again provided by Weld with Media Puzzle in 2002, while Joseph O’Brien has remarkably won the race twice with Rekindling (2017) and Twilight Payment (2020).

Vauban has a somewhat similar profile to Vintage Crop, having run in the Champion Hurdle the same year. Vintage Crop finished sixth to Granville Again while Vauban was third to Constitution Hill. Asked about the chances of Willie Mullins’s gelding, Kinane said: “I would give him a big chance. I’ve been impressed with him here so far, especially when they dropped him back to a mile and a quarter at Naas. I was there on the day and I was suitably impressed by him.

“Any of these good staying horses, the one thing they all have to have is pace, you know, so I think it’s going to be very interesting. He looks suited to the race.”

While Kinane’s days in the saddle are done, he is still recording huge wins in Australia, now in his profession as a bloodstock agent. His current role is to buy horses for the Hong Kong Jockey Club and was responsible for purchasing last weekend’s Cox Plate winner, the Irish-bred Romantic Warrior at Tattersalls Book 2 four years ago.

“It was a great thrill and highlight,” the Kildare native said. “What he has achieved in Hong Kong (three Group 1 wins) has been fantastic but, with Covid and everything, nobody has been willing to travel. I think it was a hugely courageous effort by Danny Shum (trainer) and the owner to risk travelling.

“He improved greatly from his first run and it was a fabulous achievement. He’s a very good horse and I was just fortunate to be the one with the hand up last.

“His success has been a huge pin-up for me in my first year and we had some very good horses in my second year and there have been nice horses this year. I bought 14 this year on the yearling sale circuit and hopefully we can find another Romantic Warrior.”