I Am Invincible, the $62,500 yearling which won only one Group race – the 2009 DC McKay Stakes – is Australia’s most expensive stallion, which earns almost as much for covering one mare in the breeding shed as he won on the race track.
Robert Sangster, after whom the South Australian Jockey Club named the Group One sprint the 39th edition of which will be run on Saturday, bred one of the greatest stallions but is as well known for buying the world’s costliest yearling.
Brent Stanley won the 1996 Caulfield Cup as a teenager, but the Group One-winning jockey required two more rides to post his first race victory than his talented teenage son Jett, who saluted the judge on his third competitive appearance.
Of the more than 3,000 entries on the International List of Protected Names, no appellation is more Australian than that of 1958 Kentucky Derby champion Tam Tam, which Ross Arnott of the biscuit-making family watched win at Churchill Downs.
In 1918, Bill The Bastard won the original Jericho Cup in Palestine. One hundred and three years later, another war horse, Saxon Saxoff, has earned a subsidised trip from Western Australia to Victoria to contest the 2021 edition.