Zahra was mercurial on Tuesday, somehow navigating Without A Fight from barrier 16 to be on the rail, conserving energy and following the right horses with a lap to go.
“I knew I was a long way back but ahead of me were Damien Oliver, ahead of him was J-Mac [James McDonald] and ahead of him with Ryan Moore [Vauban], so I knew if I followed jockeys that good I’d be okay,” says Zahra.
Follow he did. Some rivals went out, covering more ground, and some went in. The field fanned and Zahra punched straight through the middle and the Cup was over in a flash of yellow.
Others will have excuses. Soulcombe was slow away again. The firm track tripped up a few and a couple didn’t seem to enjoy the Melbourne heat.
But when the winner carries 56.5kg, comes from barrier 16 and wins by two and a quarter lengths, there isn’t much debating to do.
While Without A Fight joins the greats to win the Cup double, Zahra became the first jockey since Harry White in 1978-79 to win back-to-back Cups on different horses.
That came with its own pre-race anguish too - for Zahra to ride Without A Fight he had to turn his back on Gold Trip, the horse he rode to the Melbourne Cup win last year.
Those bonds run deep, but obviously not as deep as the desire, the drive to win the great race again.
Plenty thought Zahra’s decision was the wrong one but as he flew past Gold Trip at the 400m mark that decision was justified, the exclamation mark coming soon after as he rose upright in the saddle and Zahra raised two fingers to the crowd, signalling his Melbourne Cup double.
That could have been three fingers, though, had Zahra not been part of one of the more bizarre Melbourne Cup dramas just two years ago.
In August 2021, Zahra and four other jockeys were found guilty of partying at a Victorian AirBnB property. Nothing untoward in that except it was while Victoria was still under Covid-19 lockdown rules.
Racing was allowed to continue with very strict protocols: go to the races, go home type stuff and that wasn’t quite working out for Zahra, who has never hid the fact he likes to celebrate his successes. Or his defeats.
Zahra was suspended for three months and missed the 2021 Melbourne spring carnival that year including the ride on Verry Elleegant.
She went on to win the 2021 Melbourne Cup with James McDonald in the saddle, leaving Zahra to watch on television and wonder what-if.
So on Tuesday the jockey who once lost a Melbourne Cup-winning ride by going to a party was the centre of Australia’s biggest party for the second year in a row.
For Zahra, like so many of us now, the dark days of Covid and the scarcely believable moments it threw at us seem like a lifetime ago.
A time when Mark Zahra was one of the hundreds of jockeys who dreamed of one day winning a Melbourne Cup.
Now he had two and the salute to go with it.
Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald’s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world’s biggest horse racing carnivals.
