Watching horses for the sake of watching horses

The Melbourne Cup was run on Tuesday, and in Australia, unless you live in the outback and your only companion is your pet dingo, everyone was all too aware of this. Since I arrived here in the middle of September, I’ve been seeing ads for Melbourne Cup Day brunches, Melbourne Cup Day bar specials, Melbourne Cup Day outfits and Melbourne Cup Day Steve Irwin bobble head dolls. That was eight weeks ago. And finally, mercifully, on Tuesday, it happened.

What happened, you ask? Well, there was a horserace. And it was huge. Everyone in Melbourne got the day off. In Sydney, from 1pm to 3:30pm, work came to a halt. We had a company lunch. There was free beer and champagne. For others, they simply took the day off. In the streets, men wore their Sunday best and women wore dresses and crazy hats. People poured into bars. They entered into Melbourne Cup sweeps, where you pay a flat fee and pick a horse out of a bag. If your horse wins, you win the pot. And all of it, it was exciting.

Why, exactly, was it exciting?

Ummmm, yeeeeaaaaahhhh... Three days later and I’m still not sure. Because the second I began asking questions, there were no answers. Who’s in the race? Very few people could name more than a horse or two. What’s the purse for the race? No one knew. Do you ever go to the races? No, not really. What kind of bets do you like to place? (Blank stare.) Then why in God’s name is this such a big deal? The most common answer? “Because it is.”

My suspicion is that a lot of this has to do with Australia's lineage with England, which is a whole different subject. Did you know that the Queen technically still rules Australia? That if she felt like it she could dissolve the government and take over? This really complicates the Anglo-Aussie dynamic and makes it a little confusing to the outsider. But for the purposes of my argument here, suffice it to say that things are often done here because they are (or were) done in England. Hence the "Because it is" response to my query about why the Melbourne Cup is such a big deal.

Anyway, the race was run and a horse won. And within two hours of the completion of the race, I had already forgotten what the name of that horse was. And I’m willing to bet that 80% of the Australian population doesn’t have a clue either. But it was fun, so there's that.