TDN Weekend December 2016 Issue 9
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/920057
Scene 1. Exterior. The camera pans across the skyline of a distant city. Thin spring sunlight glints off glassy towers. Clouds are parting, revealing speckles and then patches of lovely clean blue. And now the camera turns to the left and downwards on a seething crowd of merry- makers at a racecourse. There are tens of thousands here. Up close, there would be plenty to occupy the retina: the cavorting, the guffawing, the clothes, the lack of clothes – take it all in, with a splash of your bubbly imbibement of choice, and grin. But the drone's eyeview is high and moves stealthily in the direction of a circle of horses behind the starting gates, homing in on tan-suited TV presenter, micro- phone in hand, walking in front of the starting stalls. Cut to close-up. The presenter: 'The Melbourne Cup. It's the race that stops a nation. The first Tues- day in November and everyone's on holiday. Horses from around the globe are loading into the starting gate. There's millions of dollars at stake: 6.2 million, to be exact. For days, one topic has dominated con- versation – every shopkeeper, every Uber driver, the parents at the school gates and the commuters on the trams and trains: who will win the 157th running of this great horserace? Can the Aussies keep the Poms and Irish at bay? Well, let me make things eas- ier for you. The winner will likely come from one of these few barriers.' He indicates the first half-dozen numbers, those nearest the rail. 'The winner won't come from over there' – he waves at the bigger num- bers. We see a jockey in luminous yellow silks enter one of these no-hope stalls. 'There's Tiberian, the French challenger going from barrier 23. He won't win. I can say that with absolute certainty because, in the last 156 years, no horse drawn 23 has ever won.'