The $6 million Melbourne Cup – run annually on the first Tuesday in November – is not only Australia's premier horserace but the richest handicap race on the planet.
And once the domain of plodding stayers capable of running the gruelling 3200m distance, the internationalisation of the race over the past 20 years has turned the event into one now where you need a genuine Group One horse to win the race – preferably one good enough to also win at weight-for-age.
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First run in 1861, the Melbourne Cup did not take long to capture the imagination of the public and as early as 1865 there was already a half-day public holiday in Melbourne for it, which became a tradition once the race switched to the first Tuesday in November in 1875.
The first Melbourne Cup was won by Archer, who – legend has it – walked from Nowra in New South Wales to contest the race, and proved that win was no fluke by backing up to win the Cup again the following year.
And to put Archer's feats into context only four more horses over the next 150 years have ever gone on to win the great race more than once – Peter Pan in 1932 and 1934, Rain Lover in 1968-69 and Think Big in 1974-75 before Makybe Diva became the first horse to win the race in three successive years from 2003-05.
The race of course is also synonymous with one man – the great Bart Cummings.
Cummings has won the event a staggering 12 times – seven more than his nearest rivals Lee Freedman and the trainer of Archer in Etienne de Mestre.
Such is the public fascination for the remarkable Cummings – who turns 86 on November 14 – that many Australians can name 'The Cups King's' 12 Melbourne Cup winners off by heart.
In order they are Light Fingers (1965), Galilee (1966), Red Handed (1967), Think Big (1974-75), Gold and Black (1977), Hyperno (1979), Kingston Rule (1990), Let's Elope (1991), Saintly (1996), Rogan Josh (1999) and Viewed (2008).
But not even Cummings was around when the immortal Carbine produced what has to be the greatest Melbourne Cup performance in history in 1890.
Carrying a record 66kg, Carbine not only won but beat the biggest Melbourne Cup field in history – a staggering 39 runners – and carried 24kg more than the horse that finished in second place.
To put Carbine's performance into perspective, he carried eight kilos more than Maykbe Diva did when the legendary mare won her third successive Melbourne Cup in 2005.
It would be 40 years before another horse would capture the public's imagination in the same way as the horse known as 'Old Jack' did in the 19th century.
Phar Lap would run third in the 1929 Melbourne Cup as a three-year-old, just days after winning the Derby, but in 1930 nothing was going to stop 'The Red Terror' who was the hero to millions of Australians during the dark days of the depression.
In his four-year-old season he won a staggering 14 races in a row, including the Cox Plate and races on all four days of the Melbourne Cup carnival - including the Cup as the shortest priced favourite in history at 8/11.
But the following year the handicapper made sure he had no chance of winning back-to-back Cups by giving him a record weight to this day of 10 stone 10 – or around 68kg in today's measurements – as he finished a gallant eighth.
Another legend of the turf would emerge more than 20 years later when Rising Fast in 1954 became the only horse in history to win Australia's three big races – the Caulfield Cup, Cox Plate and Melbourne Cup in the one year.
The following year he won the Caulfield Cup again and then came within a whisker of winning a second Melbourne Cup when lumbered with 63.5kg – which would have made him the only horse in history to win the prestigious Caulfield-Melbourne Cup double on two occasions.
The 1960s and 70s saw Cummings' dominance reach its peak but the legendary trainer should have had another Cup success in 1969 with Big Philou, whose shock scratching when hot favourite just 40 minutes before the race remains the greatest scandal in the Cup's long history.
Big Philou was nobbled – given a dose of laxatives – to prevent him running and taking out the Caulfield Cup (which he had won on protest) and Melbourne Cup double for which he had been heavily backed.
As a result bookmakers were saved a fortune and while an ex-Cummings stablehand in Les Lewis was charged with illegally doping Big Philou, he was later acquitted in court.
However Cummings publicly stated in his 2009 autobiography that he believed Lewis was the culprit but refused to name who he believed ordered his horse be 'got at' to prevent it running.
Seven years later and Van Der Hum won the wettest Melbourne Cup in history while in 1985 What A Nuisance won the first Melbourne Cup worth $1 million.
That was the second of a record-equalling four Melbourne Cup wins as an owner for Lloyd Williams, who will be trying to hold that record outright after this year with his host of leading contenders.
But Williams will have to battle the now standard foreign invasion of the race, which began when Irish trainer Dermot Weld bought out a hurdler named Vintage Crop to win the 1993 race.
Weld would become the only overseas-based trainer to win the race twice some nine years later when Media Puzzle scored the most emotional win in the history of the race for jockey Damien Oliver – just days after his brother had been killed in a race fall in Perth.
The determination by the Victoria Racing Club to internationalise the race has since seen the event also won by a Japanese horse in Delta Blues in 2006 and French gallopers Americain in 2010 and Dunaden in 2011.
And such is the legacy that the foreign raiders have left on Australia's greatest race that these days most of the leading Australian trainers rely on European-bred horses in their bid to win the race that stops a nation, as well as now most of Europe and Asia as well.