Top Australian jockey Jamie Melham has scored an emotional win in her country's biggest race aboard Half Yours and become the second female rider to win the Melbourne Cup.
Melham joined Michelle Payne – who won on 100-1 outsider Pride of Penzance ten years earlier – as the only females to win "the race that stops the nation" and is the first to capture a rare Caulfield Cup-Melbourne Cup double.
The 29-year-old was in tears as she returned to scale, revealing that her grandfather had died in the week leading up to the race.
"I have to mention my grandpa," Melham said. "He died last week. The last thing he watched was the Caulfield Cup but he was such a big supporter of mine. He was up there opening those gaps for me, because I needed a few gaps opened.
"This is what we do it for. This is why we get up out of bed every morning at 4am, work our asses off for the last 15 years I’ve been in this industry. It’s tough. It’s not all glorious and perfect as everyone can see sometimes."
Melham is known for her poise and gentle hands on front-runners and horses that race on pace, but she produced a brave, tactical ride on Half Yours. After finding the fence from barrier eight, Melham had her horse relaxed in midfield and stayed patient when Joao Moreira whipped around the field with an early run to open a wide lead aboard outsider Land Legend.
The move from Moreira meant Melham was suffled back to 14th in the 24 horse field with 800 meters to go, nd as she began to pick through the field, electing to take inside runs in the straight, one of the horses Melham brushed aside was Smokin' Romans, ridden by her husband Ben.
"I said, ‘I rode it how you told me to,’" Melham said. "We don’t normally talk racing much, but we went through this race about 10–15 times yesterday and that’s exactly what I wanted to happen. It’s not normally what you want to happen happens, but in these big races there’s so many good chances, so many chances and all you need to do is give them a good ride."
"There was a gap this big next to him and I was going to yell at him but my horse was just going too good anyway — he pulled me through the next gap, pulled me through the next gap where there was barely any room, but when a horse is going that well they just take you where you need to go."
Half Yours, trained by father and son team Tony and Calvin McEvoy, was a convincing two-and-three-quarter-length winner over Irish raider Goodie Two Shoes, with Middle Earth another length and a half away in third.
"Tony and Calvin, god they’ve got this horse so fit," Melham said. "There was definitely no question about him running out the trip today, they put that to bed very quickly. They’ve been an incredible part of my career — my first ever Flemington winner was for them, and now I’ve won the Melbourne Cup for them."
