For the First Time Since 1922, the Cox Plate Runs Away From Home

From the air the difference is a shape. Moonee Valley is a tight bowl of turf, 1805 metres around, hemmed in by the grandstands and the streets of Moonee Ponds. Its home straight is 173 metres long. The shortest in Australia. Flemington is another animal entirely. A 2312-metre pear of a course with a 450-metre home straight, two and a half times the room to run, the city skyline sitting behind the grandstand. On Saturday the Cox Plate will be run at the second of those tracks. For the first time since 1922.

The Valley rewarded one thing above all: position at the top of that short straight. The Cox Plate there was famous for its sprint out of the final turn, a race you had to be winning, or travelling ominously, with 200 metres to go. 173 metres gives nobody time to wind up from the back. None at all. The draw was doctrine too. Runners drawn in the inside two barriers have not won a Cox Plate in 25 years, and trainers would tell you they’d rather be drawn wide than buried on the rail, where the tight circuit swallows a horse whole.

Last October the old place got its farewell. Via Sistina beat her stablemate Buckaroo in a tight finish. It was the last Cox Plate on the old layout, the 105th running on the only circuit the race had ever known, and after the final race the crowd started tearing the railings down for souvenirs. The club had announced two months earlier that the Valley would close for a $220 million rebuild, and this spring the gates stayed shut. The Moonee Valley Racing Club is a nomad club this season, hosting its meetings at Cranbourne, Pakenham and Geelong, and on Saturday it takes its signature race to Flemington for one year only. “We can put our own spin on it and our own style,” chairman Adam Lennen told The Straight. “We’ll take complete ownership of that week.”

RaceHub has counted the winner’s barrier in 40 Flemington 2000-metre races since November 2020: six winners from gates 1–3, thirteen from 4–6, thirteen from 7–9, eight from 10 and wider. Flemington plays by different rules, and the numbers back that up. Winners come from everywhere, which at the Valley they simply did not. Flemington has also never staged a race at 2040 metres in RaceHub’s records. Saturday’s distance on this track is genuinely new ground. The track was rated a Good 4 at Thursday’s inspection with the rail in the true position.

The barrier draw, held Tuesday night, already behaved like a Flemington race. The Cox Plate’s draw has its own quirk: connections pick their preferred gate in draw order, and when Land Legend’s name came out first, his team chose the outside: barrier 12 of 12. At the Valley that would have been madness. The two main on-speed influences in the field, Land Legend and Light Infantry Man, will jump from the two widest gates, and at Flemington the wide draw doesn’t force the early scramble it did on the tight circuit. James McDonald, who has ridden the last four winners and chases an unprecedented fifth straight aboard Aeliana, described what the change does to the race itself. “Flemington changes the race immensely because Moonee Valley was such a unique track and it’s a race for the legends and the best horse always came out on top,” he said at the nominations announcement. “You need tactical speed, you need strength and sustained speed and a turn of foot – building the perfect weight-for-age horse.”

Nobody has ever won five Cox Plates in a row. McDonald’s sequence, Anamoe in 2022, Romantic Warrior in 2023 and Via Sistina twice, now runs into the one edition where the track can’t help him the way it used to. Aeliana, the five-year-old mare, was sixth in last year’s Plate at the Valley and third in the Turnbull over 2000 metres at Flemington this month, and she shares favouritism at around $4.50 with Sir Delius. The 450-metre straight gives McDonald room to wind her up from barrier 10. Room the Valley never offered. Sir Delius is the interesting one for the new geometry: a horse that builds momentum rather than exploding from the turn, drawn in barrier 5 for Craig Williams, trained by Gai Waterhouse, still chasing her first Cox Plate, with Adrian Bott. “He’s only had two starts this campaign and second start in the Turnbull the track was a little bit affected, the speed was on, which could easily be on again on Saturday,” Waterhouse said after the pair’s Tuesday gallop. “He’s very fit and he’s a happy, happy horse, going into the race.”

Saint George, second in the Caulfield Cup six days ago, drops back to 2040 metres under weight-for-age with the long straight in front of him. The stayers are the move’s obvious winners. Cosmic Crusader already won at this track and trip shape this spring, taking the Turnbull over 2000 metres at Flemington, though on a heavy track, which Saturday is unlikely to be. And then there are the two three-year-olds, Warwoven and Blind Raise, carrying 49.5 kilograms against the older males’ 59, nine and a half kilos of weight-for-age allowance in a race that has just become a truer test of stamina. Rachel King rides Warwoven, the Golden Rose–Caulfield Guineas winner, from barrier 2; Jamie Melham, who won the Caulfield Cup and the Melbourne Cup last year, rides Blind Raise. Either would be the first woman to win it. A first, either way. “This was the race I grew up dreaming of winning,” Melham said.

The horse the new geometry asks the hardest question of is the one who leads. Land Legend won the Might And Power leading all the way in track-record time, a front-running demolition that the Valley’s short straight would have turned into a sitting shot at the 200-metre mark. At Flemington the leader has to hold them off for 450 metres, a long way to hold a lead. Chris Waller, who saddles Aeliana and Birdman and sits one win from equalling T.J. Smith’s record of seven Cox Plates, worked both horses on the course proper Tuesday morning and liked what he saw, but even Waller’s pair are subject to the same rewritten terms. Better Loosen Up once won this race from 30 lengths back at the 1000-metre mark; Might and Power once led it all the way. The Valley honoured both kinds of winner. Land Legend, the front-running type, was a $200,000 late entry into the race.

Sir Delius drew barrier five on Tuesday night. Via Sistina won last year’s Plate from the same gate.