Rawiller is as good as engaged to ride Silent Achiever this time, but is currently riding in Japan and will not be available for the New Zealand mare's first-up run this campaign.
"I can't tell you what Nash said yesterday when I told him who was riding her in that first race - Damien Oliver," said James with a cracking smile.
Unlike decades gone by, New Zealand-trained horses don't win the Melbourne Cup out of turn these days and you go back to Ethereal in 2001 for the last one.
She was prepared by Sheila Laxon, who was one of the Victoria Racing Club's special guests at the function along with Michael Clarke, who rode At Talaq to win in 1986. Laxon is officially the first woman to prepare a Melbourne Cup winner, although unofficially Polly McDonald trained Catalogue to score in 1938, but because the Victorian racing authorities refused women licences in those days, the horse was officially declared to be trained by her husband Allan.
"I don't mind that at all," said Laxon, who recently relocated back to New Zealand, "because women are better than men - they will one day take over the world."
Not difficult to see how Sheila Laxon has overcome major hurdles in her life including life-threatening head injuries she suffered in a race fall during her time as a jockey.
Official ambassador Michael Clarke told the large attendance of his winning ride on At Talaq and of the genius of the horse's trainer Colin Hayes.
"At Talaq had been beaten by four different Kiwi horses in the lead-up races, including Bonecrusher's defeat of him in the Underwood Stakes and he was becoming something of a bridesmaid.
"The genius in Colin Hayes came out. He said, we're going to school him, and I said, really, because I wasn't the bravest jumps jockey on the block.
"I schooled him and he broke the record in winning the Mackinnon Stakes and I told the boss the horse had really switched on. I schooled him again on the Monday morning and he came out and easily won the Cup. CS [Colin Hayes] was a freak." Two decades ago when Irish-trained Vintage Crop won the Melbourne Cup, few outside Australasia paid much attention to the race. Now trainers worldwide want to win the icon event, this year worth A$6.2 million ($6.8 million).
Nine Northern Hemisphere-trained horses ran in last November's Cup and several others, including the winner Fiorente, had been purchased from Europe specifically to compete.
The Victoria Racing Club's 16-week annual tour around Australia and New Zealand, now in its 12th year, has been a promotional tsunami.
It visited Featherston, Wellington and Whakatane before Auckland then starts another part of its Australian journey in Darwin this coming week. It returns to New Zealand in late September to take in New Plymouth and Wanganui.
The 34 venues visited include all the main Australian cities as well as Lorne (VIC), Cootamundra (NSW), Sorell (TAS) Home Hill (QLD) and, for the first time, Birdsville (QLD). Birdsville, 1593km west of Brisbane, has a population just over 100 and holds an annual race meeting in September. It has a state primary school with three children, one pub, a police station manned by one officer and a hospital with one nurse. It's a place where a Melbourne Cup would attract a fair amount of attention.
Fifteen years ago 15 per cent of those attending the Melbourne Cup were from outside Victoria. That total is now 30 per cent. Forty per cent of that 30 per cent are from New Zealand.
Melbourne's leading milliner Kim Fletcher accompanied the tour, offering up her latest versions of "headpieces", which she described as fascinators on steroids. With an estimated 60,000 women's hats sold during the Melbourne spring carnival it's easy to believe Fletcher when she says she wouldn't be in business but for the Melbourne Cup.
The Cloud on Auckland's Queens Wharf was built specifically for the America's Cup, with disastrous results.
Listening to Roger James talk on Silent Achiever it might become better known for excellence in another sporting discipline.
