Is Jessicabeel Bound for the 2010 Melbourne Cup?

The Adelaide Cup was downgraded to a Group 2 race in 2007 leaving only two Group 1 races over 3200 metres on the Australian racing calendar. These are the Melbourne Cup in the spring and the Sydney Cup in the autumn. This year the Sydney Cup on 24 April 2010 was won by four-year-old mare Jessicabeel. She is only the fourth mare to win the Sydney Cup since the first running of the race in 1866.

The win of Jessicabeel in the 2010 Sydney Cup gave her five wins from 13 race starts with total prizemoney of $464,900. Two weeks before the Sydney Cup she won the Group2 Chairman’s Handicap at Randwick over 2600m clearly indicating she was a staying power to be reckoned with. In the Sydney Cup she missed the start, settled last, was well back at the turn but worked her way through the field in brilliant style to be first past the post.

The last to first Sydney Cup win gave Jessicabeel a Timeform rating of 117 which is the same rating achieved by the last mare to win the Sydney Cup before her, in 2004. That mare was the great Makybe Diva. When Makybe won the Sydney Cup she already had the first of her three Melbourne Cups under her belt, was a year older than Jessicabeel and carried more weight (55.5kg vs 52kg), making comparisons tricky.

Harris Tweed ran 3rd in the 2010 Sydney Cup and was 5th in the 2009 Melbourne Cup which is a solid guide to the strength of the win by Jessicabeel. The Sydney Cup win exempts her from the Melbourne Cup ballot and gives her automatic entry into the 2010 Melbourne Cup. If she manages to win it will make her just the third five-year-old mare to win the big race. History is against her as only two horses have ever won the Sydney Cup and the Melbourne Cup in the same year and these were two of the greatest horses in Australian turf history – Carbine in 1890 and Makybe Diva in 2004.

Trainer John O’Shea and owners J P Abrahams, J E Abrahams, Mrs D M Abrahams & D J Abrahams will run her in the Melbourne Cup barring accidents. She is bred to stay as she is by Zabeel (NZ) out of the Straight Strike mare More Diamonds (NZ), and the bookmakers are keeping her price short in the early Melbourne Cup markets.

Jo Jackson

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