Forget all your Barts, Kiwis, Arabs and Chechens, t‘was the Irish horses — Shocking, Crime Scene and Mourilyan — wot won this cup. And didn’t they do the Auld Sod proud in the process.

Shocking’s dad was Street Cry, a good Irish lad who also had carnal knowledge with Whobegotyou’s mummy when last he visited this country as a s-x tourist. The two other lads were actually born on God’s very own 32 acres of nutritious horse pasture that comes in 40 shades of green; each one more brilliant that the next.

(… pauses to puff-out chest covered in four-leaf clover, bless Himself with the sign of the cross, kiss his Miraculous Medal, thank the Good Lord for his exceptionally fortunate paternal ancestry, whistle a few bars of the Soldiers’ Song and take liquor.)

And what did I tell you the other day about the conspiracy among the horses to make things happen on a race track. Horses, I told you, speak Irish in the home but are multilingual by the time they get to the pub and arrange to fix races.

The two other Irish horses in this race, Changingoftheguard and Basaltico, were also in on the fix. Changing’s job in the morning was to convince the vet that overnight he had turned into a lame Dodo. He just lay on his back and stuck his four legs in the air. It worked like a charm.

This was a much easier role to play than Basaltico’s. He had to let Shane Crawford touch him (yuk). Then, he had to get in the way of all the other non-Irish horses during the race. His consolation prize was to be Francesca Cumani’s constant companion. He is a very, very lucky horse and will go straight to heaven when he dies.

There are a few other things you need to know about the conspiracy among the horses. First, they are not vegetarians because they are into animal liberation or any other hippy nonsense such as  that; they eat so much grass because they really hate the stuff.

The stuff does give them the energy they need to cover broodmares all night and run around like blue-arsed flies all day but they say it is overrated. They prefer drinking Guinness, which is made from barley. This is why their teeth are always brown.

The other thing you should know about the horses is they don’t like Bart. They say he gets too much attention. They say they give him most of his one-liners. They say he doesn’t whisper to them but shouts at them. They say he is  mean to them during track work.

They say he was riding for a fall this spring and they were happy to oblige. They say they set him up for the fall so they could bring him down a peg or two with the whole world watching.

They say this race is the heavyweight championship of the world for racing on the flat over a fair distance and there was no better place to cruel his pitch; to show the world that Emperor Bart has no clothes.

If this is the race that stops the nation, these horses developed a plan to stop The Man in the race that stops the nation. It was executed to perfection by these few; these Irish few. God bless them!

This gigantic sting also caught thousands upon thousands of pundits, coat-tuggers, gombeens and gobshites who all said that Bart could do no wrong. They all said that Bart was bigger than God. They all said that Bart’s three horses would all cross the line in a dead heat.

They were wrong and I was right. I told you not to bet on this race because I knew the fix was in. Only I, dear readers, was prepared to tell you the truth about the great horse conspiracy of 2009. Next year is the 150th running of the Big Cup. Anything could happen.

The $5.65 million Melbourne Cup (3200m, two metric miles, 16 furlongs, handicap) has been running continuously at Flemington since 1861. The running rail was in the true position, the turf was rated Dead 4 and the penetrometer was reading 4.86.

THE RECKONING

I am not going to do the horse and jockey sections today because of the obvious over-exposure and instead get down to the tin tacks.

On the Metlink train to Flemington from North Melbourne station I sat down next to a County Wicklow man who was out here to see his first Melbourne Cup and he asked me did I know anything about the Old Country.

Yes indeed I did, I told him, and had even been to his local racecourse at Punchestown in County Dublin. We discussed the different betting systems and he reminded me that a First Four bet in Ireland is called a Yankee bet.

On arriving in the Members’ Forum at Flemington, I took liquor and proceeded to Mr Rod Cleary’s white bagman with all haste and took a boxed Yankee first four on the remaining four Irish horses in the race.

Alas, Basaltico let me down when Master O’Reilly took fourth place. Despite his name, this O’Reilly character doesn’t have a drop of Celtic blood in his body and I did me dough. The Yankee paid $85,428.50 and I didn’t have it.