Racing: Mr Tipsy has the credentials to enhance NZ record

Think the Sydney Cup and your first reaction is that New Zealand has a good record in Randwick's premier staying event.

Wrong.

Certainly in the past two decades.

Katrina Alexander was the last New Zealand trainer to win the Sydney Cup with Honor Babe back in 2003.

The most recent win before that was in 1992 when My Eagle Eye scored for Murray Baker, for whom Katrina Alexandra coincidentally once worked.

Baker gets a wonderful opportunity to add to that record when he produces Mr Tipsy, co-trained by son Bjorn, in Saturday's A$700,000 feature.

There are massive positives for Mr Tipsy.

One of the biggest is that in finishing second, beaten by two lengths, to Spin Around in the Auckland Cup last month, Mr Tipsy showed he can manage the 3200m.

The other is the weight.

Mr Tipsy drops from the 58.5kg he carried into fourth in the A$2.5 million BMW last start to 51kg on Saturday. That effort behind Fiumicino and Theseo was better than it looks.

Top Australian jockey Michael Rodd rarely makes mistakes and although it wasn't a bad ride, Mr Tipsy would have finished closer had Rodd taken a couple of different options.

"Good run," Rodd told co-trainer Bjorn Baker as he jumped off the horse in the Rosehill birdcage.

Murray Baker created a possible record when My Eagle Eye won - it was just the horse's 12th appearance.

Mr Tipsy will be having start No 13.

The perception of a good New Zealand record in the Sydney Cup was probably created by our horses winning three of the four previous Cups behind My Eagle Eye.

Just A Dancer won for Graeme Rogerson in 1991, King Aussie took the race the year before for trainer John Harris, and two years earlier, Banderol picked up the Cup for Dave O'Sullivan.

King Aussie was a horse-racing certainty in his year. He was one of the few in the field who could manage the 3200m, but his ability on one of the wettest tracks in memory for the Sydney autumn carnival made the New Zealander unbeatable.

It rained so heavily leading up to the Sydney Cup that year that they put the raceday back a week.

Problem was it kept raining and the Randwick track was so heavy and deep King Aussie swam his way around for rider Noel Harris and had the race won a long way out.

It was almost as easy as when the mighty Kingston Town won the 1980 Sydney Cup as a 3-year-old.

He barely got out of second gear and became one of the easiest career wins for rider Malcolm Johnston.

Nigel Tiley was aboard the Alan Jones-trained Azawary when he won the Cup in 1982, four years after Good Lord, racing in Australia as My Good Man, won it for Ray Verner.

The 1970s saw three of the greats - Apollo Eleven (1973), Battle Heights (1974) and Oopik (1976) - set a very mean standard for the Kiwi stayers who followed.