Racing: Xcellent shows Cup credentials

Xcellent will win the A$5 million ($5.4 million) Melbourne Cup in November.

That is the only conclusion you can draw from the staggering performance to win Saturday's $200,000 Mudgway Fair Tax For Racing Stakes at Hastings.

Forget Xcellent's dramatic $500,000 Mercedes Derby win at Ellerslie at his third start. Forget his eclipse of the likes of St Reims in the group one Darley Stakes at his fourth start.

Saturday saw the real measure of his greatness.

Unbelievable is a hackneyed phrase in racing but it is justifiable to describe what Xcellent did to win, simply because logic told you he couldn't do what he did.

Logic said Miss Potential would lead. She was always going to come down the home straight very quickly and logic told you that gave the horses two or three lengths behind no chance.

Horses from 10 lengths back, well, you didn't even entertain the idea.

That's exactly what Xcellent did.

Logic applies to 99.9 per cent of horse races, but great, great horses and champions defy logic. Sunline did it. Bonecrusher did it. Rough Habit did it.

Reese Jones on Miss Potential wasn't quite sure what to think. He rode Xcellent in training before he raced and told the Moroney/Scott stable it was the best horse he'd ridden in at least five years.

But 100m off the finish on Saturday, when Miss Potential had fought off Shinzig, he could sense Xcellent coming, but was certain he had the race won.

"I could hear Tony Lee [commentator] raise his voice suddenly and I knew there was a horse coming fast and I knew what it would be - it had to be Xcellent.

"I looked where the winning post was and said, 'We've won, even Xcellent couldn't pick us up from here'.

"In the next second he sling-shot us that quickly he was past us and gone."

Jones is enough of a realist to accept you can't be disappointed in being beaten by a performance you might not see in a decade.

On a track that was yielding after brief, but very heavy, midday rain, Miss Potential, without having to leave the inside rail, ran her last 600m in front in a fast 34.12 seconds.

Xcellent, who was last at the 600m, left the rail before the home turn and still came home in an unbelievable 32.98.

For a staying horse that had not previously raced at less than 1600m, to record that section at the end of 1400m is simply beyond belief.

Syndicate managing part owner Paul Moroney is rarely lost for words but when he stopped to speak to media for a moment he was speechless.

When composure finally came he said: "I'm this horse's biggest fan. I know what he's capable of and I'm staggered he could do what we've just seen.

"I honestly gave him no chance of winning."

But there is a slight cloud - weights for the Melbourne Cup are declared this Thursday and the question is how much this performance will affect his handicap for Flemington.

Weights are important in any race but never more so than in a Melbourne Cup.

The longer the race, the more important relative weight becomes simply because horses carry it for a greater length of time, which is why sprinters can successfully carry big weights.

Melbourne Cups are run at a very high cruising speed, which simply gets more and more brutal from the 800m. There is no place to hide in a Melbourne Cup.

For the huge stakemoney it can also be a rugged push-and-shove.

When they come past the Flemington clocktower with 300m to run, 1kg to a spent horse can make the difference between a place in racing folklore and running second in a Melbourne Cup.

The Xcellent camp was never worried about the Mudgway impacting on its Cup handicap, because they at no stage believed he could win on Saturday.

Suddenly it's a different scenario.

Victorian handicapper Jim Bowler, regarded as one of the world's best, retired last year after framing the weights for 18 Melbourne Cups.

As all handicappers do, he copped his share of criticism, but he made few mistakes. Probably the only memorable, and thankful, one was in 1983 allowing Kiwi into the race on a light weight because at age 6 he regarded the New Zealand stayer as too old.

When framing his all-important Cup weights, Bowler traditionally disregarded three things, form from the Adelaide Cup, Brisbane Cup and almost all New Zealand races.

This time Bowler's long-time understudy Greg Carpenter is stepping up to what could be the most difficult set of Cup weights in a decade.

He may well have a different perception of New Zealand form and Bowler probably did not have a performance to evaluate such as the one produced by Xcellent at Hastings.

The tough issue for Carpenter - and one which may play in Xcellent's favour - is where to weight Makybe Diva, winner of the last two Melbourne Cups.

Last November Makybe Diva carried a Cup record winning weight for a mare of 55.5kg and did it easily.

In an interview with Melbourne's Herald Sun last week, Carpenter said he would give Makybe Diva a weight which would allow her a chance to win and also offered others a chance to beat her.

That's not a job you want, but it means he probably can't give the mare more than 57kg, even after she came out on Saturday and, fresh from an overseas campaign and a spell, scored an hugely impressive and easy win in the Memsie Stakes in Melbourne.

If she gets 57kg it will almost certainly result in the weights for horses beneath her being compressed.

Either way it will be a nervous few days for the Moroney/Scott stable.

The last word goes to Xcellent's winning rider Michael Coleman, whose suspension aboard Haylee Baylee, which cost him a riding trip to Penang this weekend, was forgotten after the Mudgway.

"Xcellent probably isn't a good enough name for him now, is it?" Coleman said, flashing that winning smile of his.

If he gets over the line at Flemington on the first Tuesday in November, it won't be by a country mile.