Quotes of the Day

For days before the great annual horse race that crowds marquees, backyards and pubs around Australia, the form and fortunes of one bay mare fueled a national conversation. Makybe Diva, the two-time Melbourne Cup winner who'd been passed over when she was offered for sale as a foal, was on the cusp of history and almost everyone wanted a front-row seat. Could the mare do it? Would it matter if she didn't? Would she even run? What might the television crews, peeping through the bushes surrounding her trainer Lee Freedman's coastal property, reveal about her training sessions? So fevered was interest in the seven-year-old's chances that by the time race day dawned hot and cloudy it seemed the only opinion lacking was from Makybe herself.

In the end, she had her say in three minutes and 19 seconds of equine magic. By taking the 3,200-m Melbourne Cup in 2003 and 2004, Makybe had become one of just five dual winners in the 144-year history of Australia's best-loved horse race. None had managed the elusive hat trick. So on Nov. 1 the 106,480 people at the Flemington track (and around 10 million Australian television viewers), many of them teaming blue-and-red Makybe caps and masks with their feathers and ties, were more nervous than the favorite, who was characteristically unfazed by the heat and fuss. She didn't run the fastest (record-holder Kingston Rule was three seconds quicker in 1990) or carry the heaviest handicap weight (the legendary Carbine carried 65.5-kg to win in 1890). But that hardly mattered to the whooping crowd, who reached toward the victor's gleaming flanks as she came past. "Have you ever seen a horse like her?" shouted jubilant young men in suits for hours afterwards, while other punters, sun-dazed and champagne-happy, toasted her and chanted her name.

Off-track betting on the Cup meet in Victoria alone was up 13% on last year, and people came from everywhere to cheer for the mare as if she were their own. Craig and Michelle Hill looked like locals with their Diva caps, but they drove the 5,000 km from their home in Port Hedland, Western Australia, to urge her on. It wouldn't detract from her greatness if she lost, they agreed before the race, but wouldn't it be something if she won? "She's just special - and she's a mare, having a crack at history against the boys," says Michelle. It proved more than a tilt. By the time he and Makybe were "a mile out," jockey Glen Boss knew the record was theirs: "That's the best part of my job, when you're out there and it's just you and her." Still, it was impossible to ignore the roar of the crowd, which, as they surged into the home straight, "was so powerful I could feel it vibrating through my body," says Boss. "You feel like a rock star." Even punters who backed other horses, or those who came just for the mingling and millinery, knew they were watching a celebrity. "The only reason I came today is so I can say I was here," said one in the crowd.

It was a glorious finale for a career that began with a modest fourth place in the mare's debut appearance at a Victorian country race meet just three years ago. Rob Childs was there that day, but he remembers only her odd name - concocted from the first two letters of the Christian names of five of owner Tony Santic's female staffers. "When you see them running their maiden at Benalla and coming fourth, you don't put them down as one to watch," says Childs. But Boss easily recalls the first time he rode Makybe, at a track-work session one morning in 2003. The sense that here was something special was almost instantaneous. "It was like getting out of an old bomb into a really good car," he says. "If you asked her to run through a wall, she'd ask how fast and how many walls."

For Makybe those walls are about to be replaced by paddock fences. Though Boss says he's never seen a horse with her recuperative powers, Makybe was spent after the race. So it seemed fitting that it was on the victor's podium that Santic, the engaging self-made tuna baron from the South Australian fishing town of Port Lincoln, announced to her "20 million owners" that their winner wouldn't race again. The crowd went home lingering over the inevitable comparisons with other track greats - a contest Boss has little time for. "They all have their own stories and they're all special in their own way," he says. "And Makybe's one of the best." Perhaps trainer Harry Telford put it best in 1930 after another spectacular Cup win: "What can I say? Phar Lap is a great horse - that seems to cover it."

• Lisa Clausen
• An Australian mare pulls off her third Melbourne Cup in a row and gallops into horse-racing immortality