PERTH'S MELBOURNE HOPE

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 4, 5 July 1938, Page 15

PERTH'S MELBOURNE HOPE

Western Australian owners are better represented., in this year's Melbourne Cup than has been the case for many years and if a horse from that State is to win the race perhaps it will be Maikai, hero of the last W.A.T.C, Christmas Carnival, says a Perth writer. .

The Pantheon four-year-old was sent to Sydney and was entered for the Sydney Cup. However, he. failed to see the post for that race, as he was developing a seedy toe, and it was deemed advisable to spell him. He was always the master of Apollo over a middle distance when the pair were racing on Perth tracks. Apollo's subsequent good form in the Eastern States, which included a close second in the Sydney Cup, suggests that Maikai will be a very hard horse to account for in such a race as the Melbourne Cup..That iSj of course, providing the Pantheon gelding can be got to that pitch of physical fitness to which J. J. Kelly had him for the last Perth Cup.

Since its inception the Melbourne Cup has been won only once by a Western Australian-owned galloper. Tha^; was in 1905, when Blue Spec carried the colours of Mr. P. A. Connolly to victory. Maikai has proved himself a stayer of class and there is no reason why he should not follow in the footstepsi of Blue Spec. If Maikai cannot rise to the occasion, the west has an» other possibility in the Defoe horsa Footmark, winner of this season's W.A. Derby. L . _