Melbourne Cup Greytown-bound

One of the world's great sporting trophies, the Melbourne Cup, is coming to Greytown to help celebrate the 1954 cup winner Rising Fast.
A month before the race that stops two nations is held at Flemington racecourse in Melbourne, the streets of Greytown, birthplace of the gelding that turned racing records on their ear, will fill with people coming to town especially to celebrate his remarkable track achievements.
Officials from the Victoria Racing Club are making the pilgrimage to Greytown on the invitation of the man behind the celebrations, public relations guru Gerry Morris, and will bring with them the actual Melbourne Cup to be presented a few weeks later to the owners of the 2011 cup winner.
Mr Morris, who owns his own PR company in Wellington and has been closely associated with racing and its promotion all his life, is not stopping there.
He came to Greytown this week to meet Sue Robertson, the widow of Frank who bred Rising Fast at Platform Farm, Greytown, in 1949, and then trod the hallowed turf of the farm for himself.
Mr Morris is determined to put on the biggest street party possible in Greytown, timed to start just after the arrival at Woodside Station of the Australian visitors aboard the train he has labelled the Rising Fast Express.
He wants Mrs Robertson, 93, to be at the railway station alongside a brass band when the dignitaries arrive and to make their way into Greytown where townspeople and visitors will have hopefully picked up on the importance of the occasion.
"I want to see the businesses become involved and as many people as possible wearing Rising Fast's colours blue, gold and black," he said.
In those colours more than 50 years ago, the Greytown-bred gelding captured the imagination and admiration of the racing world.
In 1954, Rising Fast not only won the Melbourne Cup but also the Caulfield Cup, Cox Plate, Turnbull Stakes, Caulfield Stakes, MacKinnon Stakes and the Fisher Plate.
The next spring he went within a hair's breadth of completing a second Caulfield Cup/ Melbourne Cup double, winning at Caulfield but finishing runner-up in the Melbourne Cup under a huge weight disadvantage to Toporoa.
Many on course at Flemington that day believed he was severely checked by the winner and should have been awarded the race.
For his own part, Mr Morris intends to come to Greytown dressed in the style of racegoers in the mid-1950s, and is using an old photograph of Rising Fast's owner, Leicester Spring, as his blueprint.
To keep this year's Melbourne Cup company, Mr Morris is attempting to arrange to have the cups won by Silver Knight (1971) and Efficient (2007) as companions on the visit to Greytown.
He plans to have a street parade, a fashions-in-the-field competition and will erect a big-screen television so the last 400m of the 1954 Melbourne Cup can be replayed.
"Rising Fast is Wairarapa's most under-rated champion," he said. "To my mind, he is right up there with Sir Brian Lochore, who incidentally we would love to see come along on the day."
Mrs Robertson recalls listening with Frank to the 1954 running of the Melbourne Cup and of Rising Fast's breeder trying not to be over-confident and saying he wouldn't win: "Frank said he didn't think he would do any good, he was very wrong."