Three and a half years ago Gary Melville-Smith had never owned a horse.
Five years ago John Thompson was in the same position.
This afternoon the two give New Zealand an outstanding chance of lifting the greatest racing prize of all, the $A3 million Melbourne Cup with two of the three favourites, Kaapstad Way and Diatribe.
Gary Melville-Smith cannot believe where he is in racing right now. He looked around at the 92,000 who packed Flemington on Derby Day on Saturday and shook his head.
The thought of having the favourite for the Melbourne Cup in front of an even bigger crowd was a little too much.
"This hasn't sunk in yet. Reality's out here," he says stretching his arm to full length, "and we haven't caught up."
To win the Melbourne Cup with your first horse just does not happen.
Melville-Smith and his wife Sandra are the principal owners of Kaapstad Way, who officially races for the Chatsworth Trust, an investment set up a few years ago.
"We're only observers in all this. Everyone else has made the decisions around the horse and we're happy with that.
"We're more into patting him and giving him love," says Sandra.
Lots of loves if he gets over the line first today to pick up the $A2 million winner's cheque.
Melville-Smith and Thompson are battlers only in terms of their short involvement in racing. Melville-Smith is a businessman and company director and Thompson accumulated considerable wealth when he sold out his shares in an Australian mining company a few years ago.
Melbourne Cup myths and legends grow like roses at Flemington and Melville-Smith and Thompson could weave their way into the fabric today.
The race is the world's biggest outdoor party and fascinated Mark Twain. It led one overseas visitor to note that to call it a "horse race" was like calling World War II an "international incident".
Some of the world's richest have won the Cup but, appropriate to the everlasting image of the average Aussie, it remains the field of dreams for every battler who missed a meal to feed a horse.
In 1987 one of the world's richest men, Nelson Bunker Hunt, sent royally bred Rosedale to Australia to win the Cup. He was beaten by cheap New Zealand import Kensei, syndicated by Harry Lawton, who looks like a trawler skipper; and ridden by Larry Olsen, who ate nothing but rice for 12 months to get back in the saddle after years of milking cows.
Dubai's Sheikh Mohammed is desperate for his world champion Godolphin stable to win the Cup.
He came close last year when Central Park was nosed out by a brumbie named Rogan Josh, bred in the bush in Perth, named after an Indian curry and owned by a teacher of English in Darwin, who was driving her Holden from Melbourne to Darwin with the Melbourne Cup on the back seat at the time the Dubai contingent was flying home in a private 747.
The Sheikh is back again, this time with outsider Lightning Arrow. He has the world's finest jockey Frankie Dettori on side to try and achieve his wish.
Dettori doesn't have to milk cows - he's reputed to be on a £9 million a year contract with Godolphin - but then he hasn't won a Melbourne Cup either.
English trainer James Fanshawe, who has well-fancied Arctic Owl in the Cup, was asked at Sunday's international press conference what he learned from his first trip to the Melbourne Cup last year.
"That I wanted to come back this year," he said."To get more than 100,000 to a horse race is something fantastic."
Press secretaries for the leaders of both major Australian parties say the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition will be too busy running the country to stop parliament to attend, or even to watch it.
But they're politicians.
Everyone else will be watching sport's best three and a half minutes of theatre.
Racing: Newcomers overwhelmed in field of dreams
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