Racing: Sun starting to set on Bart's Rule

Guidelines for training Melbourne Cup winners are changing.

In the past three decades, Bart's Rule has held sway, at least for Australian and New Zealand stayers.

Bart's Rule is the dictum of legendary trainer Bart Cummings that horses should have had a lead-up of 10,000m in their races for tackling the ultimate staying 3200m test of the cup.

It has worked for him - he has trained the winners of 11 Melbourne Cups. Cummings has traditionally given his horses their final lead-in race in the Mackinnon Stakes over 2000m, three days before the cup.

But the times are a-changing. Irish trainer Dermot Weld was able to produce the 1993 winner Vintage Crop with no lead-up races in the spring. His preparation was done away from the racetrack.

That has changed the mind of Lee Freedman, who won his fourth cup on Tuesday with Makybe Diva.

The mare, who won the cup last year when trained by David Hall, didn't have the same preparation as Vintage Crop, but was having her first run since a close-up second to Elvstroem in the Caulfield Cup on October 16.

She had five starts before the cup this spring, running up 7400m on her odometer.

"It was a conscious decision," Freedman said of the decision to avoid running her last weekend.

"Dermot led the way. He opened our eyes when he won with Vintage Crop.

"Unless the horse absolutely needed the run [at the preceding weekend], there is no way I would run it in any other circumstance," he told Melbourne sports radio station 927.

He said the theory had worked well for Cummings, but Freedman thought the risk of a horse injuring itself on Derby Day was too great.

"Bart has done it fairly exclusively and it has worked well for him and I am not here to question what Bart Cummings does, he's a great trainer.

"But from my perspective the risk is far too great. If you get a firm track and the horse jars then you have got a disaster on your hands trying to patch them up for the Tuesday.

"I'd rather be going in with a very slight doubt than going in with a sore horse."

Freedman was still enjoying the buzz from winning his fourth cup.

"To win it was such a personal achievement, it's so hard to do."

If he won a fifth cup next year, it was unlikely to be with Makybe Diva, who set a weight-carrying record for a mare and would get a couple of extra kilograms more if she were to line up next year.

"She is weighted out of anything here, the handicaps here are over for her."

Freedman wants to take the mare to Paris.

- NZPA