In the 1944 Hollywood blockbuster National Velvet, Mickey Rooney's former jockey Mi reacts with incredulity when Elizabeth Taylor's 12-year-old character announces her intention to train a horse she has won in a raffle to run in the Grand National, Britain's premier steeplechase and one of the toughest races in the world.
“Who do you think you are?”, Rooney admonishes Taylor’s character Velvet Brown, the humble daughter of a butcher. “Poking your head out among the stars, believing you could take the richest, grandest prize a horse ever won …”
But young Velvet has a further surprise in store – she not only trains the horse, but rides it to victory herself (only slightly marring the film’s proto-feminist message by fainting with the excitement of it all at the end).
As fanciful as the plot of National Velvet was regarded at the time – "highly unlikely" and "far-fetched", according to one reviewer – there are parallels to the inspirational real-life story and achievements of the Australian jockey Michelle Payne.
On Tuesday, 30-year-old Payne realised a dream she had nurtured for 25 years by becoming the first woman to win the Melbourne Cup, known to Australians as “the race that stops the nation”.
Sponsored by Emirates Airline, it’s also the world’s richest handicap race, with more than half of the total prize money of 6.2 million Australian dollars (Dh16.2m) going to the winner.
Payne left an all-male field of top riders, including Frankie Dettori, trailing in her dust – and trampled into the turf of Victoria Racing Club’s Flemington Racecourse the ruins of the myth that there are some things women can’t do as well as men. There was no fainting after she passed the post on the 100-1 outsider Prince of Penzance.
Born on September 29, 1985, in Miners Rest, a small community 100 kilometres north-west of Melbourne, the coastal capital of Victoria state, Michelle had a tough start in life. The youngest of 10 children, she was just 6 months old when her mother, Mary, was killed in a car accident.
Her father, Paddy, made sure the memory of her mother stayed alive.
“My dad always talked about her to me, always told me what a beautiful lady she was,” Payne recalled in an interview in 2009. “Dad used to tell me every day how lucky he was. I think it was good for him to get it out, but it was good for me, too.”
Enough love for two parents wasn’t the only gift her father, a jockey-turned-trainer, gave his daughter. Part of the package was an affection for horses and a respect for hard graft.
Left to bring up 10 children on his own, Paddy had been “just absolutely amazing”, Payne said in an interview after her win on Tuesday.
In 1981, four years before she was born, the Paynes moved to Australia from their home country of New Zealand, after their dairy farm-cum-stables had to be sold to the local council.
Starting over with a new farm outside the Victoria city of Ballarat meant it was all hands to the pump, especially after her mother died, Payne recalled.
All the children “had to work really hard on the farm, which we didn’t really like at the time”, she said. “But I appreciate it now, because he really taught us to have a good work ethic. I’m so grateful for my upbringing because I wouldn’t be here without that.”
At first, Payne's 11-year-old sister Bernadette became her surrogate mother. "She used to get up in the middle of the night and feed me, then fall asleep in school," she told The Age newspaper in 2009.
When Bernadette left home, it was another sister, Therese, who took over. “I used to buy her Mother’s Day gifts at school when everyone would take 2 dollars and buy something for their mum.”
Paddy put his daughter on a horse for the first time when she was 4 – or, rather, a Shetland pony, which promptly threw her off. Her dad’s advice? “Get back on or you never will.” She did, and she was hooked.
“From when I was 5 years old, I used to drive him mad,” she recalled this week. “I used to go to bed and hold on to his hand and say ‘Don’t forget to wake me up in the morning’”, so she could go riding.
Woe betide him if he forgot: “I was so mad at him, I’d go running over to the stables crying.”
With seven of her siblings following in their father’s footsteps to become jockeys, it was perhaps inevitable that Payne would do the same.
As the first of eight siblings in the family – five sisters and two brothers – to get a jockey’s licence, Brigid, the eldest, led the way.
In 1985, three weeks after Payne was born, Therese, 15, and Brigid, 16, became the first sisters to place first and second in a horse race in Victoria.
Their father had “never really pushed us into it”, Michelle recalled. “We just grew up with horses. I don’t think he really wanted us to be jockeys but … he gave us his full support.”
She was about 5 years old when she began to dream of winning the Melbourne Cup – and at the age of 7, earned the derision of school friends when she told them she would.
The road from dream to reality, though, was a long and often painful one, and with thousands of races and hundreds of wins to her credit, Payne’s success has been the opposite of overnight.
She rode her first winner – Reigning, a horse trained by her father – in 2001, at the age of 15. Three years later, in 2004, she fractured her skull in a headfirst fall from a horse during a race at Sandown in Melbourne.
With bleeding on the brain, for a while it was touch-and-go, and her family tried to persuade her to quit the sport. She was, she pointed out, “at no more risk” than the male jockeys to whom two of her sisters were married, and after seven months spent in recovery, was back in the saddle.
“I always felt that I would get back,” Payne said later. “I’m very determined, and that was all I wanted to do.”
She wasn’t even persuaded to call it a day in 2007, when Brigid, then 36, suffered a series of aneurysms and a fatal heart attack months after a bad fall from a horse.
Michelle’s tenacity was rewarded in 2009, when she rode her first winner in Group One, the highest standard in Australian thoroughbred racing.
She came closest to hanging up her boots in 2012, when two more falls left her with nine fractured vertebrae.
“I came home and said to my dad: ‘I think that’s me done’,” she told Australia’s Channel 7.
But it wasn’t. Two years ago, she was teamed up with Prince of Penzance, and quickly realised this was a horse with a big future. She has ridden him ever since, in 22 of his 23 outings.
“I told my sister two years ago when I won on this horse at Flemington that he was good enough to win the Melbourne Cup,” she said this week. “She was like: ‘Yeah, whatever.’ But I’ve said it ever since.”
Racing has always been a family affair for Payne. Her brother Stevie, who has Down syndrome and works as a strapper, or groom, for the trainer Darren Weir, looks after Prince of Penzance, and led him out on Tuesday. Payne and her brother are inseparable.
“He said: ‘Don’t get beat,’” Michelle recalled after the race. “I’m so excited I could get the job done for him today. It’s a dream come true.”
After her victory, Payne thanked Weir, who had “given me a go”, but pointed out that some of the horse’s owners hadn’t wanted her to ride him. It was, she said, “such a chauvinistic sport [and] I know some of the owners were keen to kick me off”.
One of the doubters was Sandy McGregor. After the win, he told The Age that he and fellow owner John Richards had tossed a coin over lunch, and "I got to choose the colours, John chose the jockey". Now, he said: "I'll put her on all of them."
It will take a while, though, for the chauvinism to wash out of horse racing. Even after Payne’s historic win, her profile on www.racing.com, a website funded by Victoria’s racing clubs, was this week still offering the opinion that, among the Paynes, “her brother Patrick – now a trainer – is arguably the best of the clan”, even though he never achieved a comparable win in his career.
Post-Melbourne Cup, and now considering retirement, Payne had this succinct message for those in the male-dominated racing community who had doubted her. They could “get stuffed … they think women aren’t strong enough but we just beat the world”.
That sentiment would have been music to the ears of Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the British suffragette movement who fought for women’s rights in the early 20th century.
By chance, the colours Payne wore as she rode to victory – purple, white and green – matched those on the flag of Pankhurst’s militant organisation, the Women’s Social and Political Union.
And this week in Melbourne, its motto – “Deeds, not words” – was most faithfully served.
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