There are sporting achievements that impress, and then there are those that seem to suspend disbelief entirely. Makybe Diva's three consecutive victories in the Melbourne Cup, claimed in 2003, 2004, and 2005, belonged firmly to the second category. Now, with the great mare's death at the age of 27 from a sudden colic attack, the question of whether racing will ever produce anything quite like her feels less like hyperbole and more like honest reckoning.
Her trainer, Lee Freedman, seemed to sense as much in the immediate aftermath of that third victory at Flemington, in front of 106,479 spectators. "Go out and find the smallest child here," he told the crowd, "because that child might be the only person who lives long enough to see something like this again. None of us ever will." Two decades on, those words have settled into something close to prophecy.
What often goes unmentioned is how improbable the whole story was from the very beginning. Bred in the United Kingdom by Desert King out of Tugela, the filly with white socks and a white star was passed in at the Tattersalls sale as a nine-month-old, failing to reach her reserve of 20,000 guineas. She was loaded onto a cargo plane alongside crates of bananas and sent to Arrowfield Stud near Scone, NSW, on the instructions of Tony Santic, a tuna farmer from Port Lincoln and the son of Croatian migrants who had rebuilt his fortunes by pioneering tuna farming off South Australia's coast. Santic gave his new acquisition a name built from an acronym of five of his employees: Maureen, Kylie, Belinda, Diane, and Vanessa. It was, from the outset, a story that refused to follow a conventional script.
Her race debut on 5 July 2002, a modest fillies sprint at Benalla in regional Victoria, ended in fourth place on a muddy winter's day. But her first trainer, David Hall, saw enough to bring her along patiently through races at Wangaratta and Sandown, building toward the stayer she would become. Her first Melbourne Cup win in 2003 drew admiration, if not yet the reverence that would follow. Santic, characteristically bold, had placed $500,000 on her at the traditional call of the card. She came from 13th at the 400-metre mark to win, and the watching public took notice.
Hall departed for Hong Kong shortly after, and Freedman assumed training duties, moving the mare to his Mornington Peninsula complex. The 2004 Cup was harder, contested on a heavy track against a deep international field that included the Irish champion Vinnie Roe. She still found a way through. By the time October 2005 arrived, her legend was building, but it was the Cox Plate at Moonee Valley that silenced the remaining doubters. Racing traditionalists sometimes dismissed stayers as ill-suited to the tactical demands of a sprint track. On that afternoon, Makybe Diva sat midfield, swung wide on the turn, and accelerated with a ferocity that had fans holding aloft masks in her red, blue and white colours and chanting her name. Ten days later came the third Cup, and then, quietly, the end.
"It's over," Santic told Freedman in the mounting yard, moments after she returned to scale. "To ask anything more of this wonderful mare would not be fair," he told the crowd before calling for three cheers. The farewell felt less like a sporting retirement and more like a civic occasion.
The numbers alone suggest the scale of her reach. A record 2.6 million viewers tuned in for her third Cup victory, the largest television audience for the race since the introduction of the people meter ratings system. U2 frontman Bono, then leading the world's biggest band, rang Freedman to offer his congratulations. Jockey Glen Boss, on his victory lap, declared the mare "bigger than the prime minister." One reader wrote to The Age the following morning that the horse had given Australians "a licence to dream, to celebrate and to rejoice together in a time where terrorism, debt and uncertainty dominate the headlines." That the letter appeared in a broadsheet's letters page, rather than a racing publication, captured something real about what she had become.
Not every chapter of her story was triumphant. An overseas campaign in Japan ended in disappointment, including a well-beaten finish in the Emperor's Cup at Kyoto over 3200 metres, the only time she was defeated over that distance. The unfamiliar track surface and the rhythms of international competition seemed to work against her. It was a reminder that greatness, even of her order, has its limits and its context.
She retired with 15 wins from 36 starts, prize money exceeding $14 million, and a Group 1 record that included three Melbourne Cups, a Cox Plate, a Sydney Cup, a Tancred Stakes, an Australian Cup and a Turnbull Stakes. She spent her post-racing years at Makybe Stud at Gnarwarre, just west of Geelong in Victoria's south-west. Her progeny never reached her heights, which surprises no one who understands that greatness of this kind does not transfer by bloodline alone.
At Flemington Racecourse today, two horses stand in bronze. Phar Lap, chest puffed, immortalised from the Depression era. And Makybe Diva, mane flowing, gaze unbroken. Racing historian Les Carlyon wrote that she had "brought more glory to the Cup than any winner since Carbine in 1860." Freedman, for his part, put it more directly: "I don't want to run Phar Lap down, but I never saw Phar Lap win three Cups."
The Australian racing industry will continue to produce great horses and extraordinary stories. The Cup will keep being run on the first Tuesday of November, and future champions will earn their place in the record books. But the particular combination of circumstance, character, and sheer competitive force that produced Makybe Diva, a failed yearling sale lot from the UK, flown to Australia in a cargo hold, trained patiently through muddy provincial meetings, and ultimately watched by millions on a warm afternoon in 2005, is not something that can be manufactured or predicted. It emerges, rarely and unexpectedly, and then it is gone. Those who watched her run will not need a bronze statue to remember how it felt.