How Often Does a Roughie Actually Win the Melbourne Cup?
Only 20 of 164 Melbourne Cups have been won by a horse starting at $31 or longer, so the roughie is rarer than memory suggests.
Recorded August 2025 for Million Dollar Melbourne Cup 2025 Challenge Ep 1. Any figures mentioned are from that time.
Odds are my favourite factor when I work through the Melbourne Cup, and the reason is simple. The race has a reputation for producing fairytales, but the record does not really back that up. The first Cup was run in 1861 and won by Archer. Since then, only 20 of 164 Cups have been won by a horse starting at $31 or longer. That is lower than I expected before I looked it up, and it changes how I think about where the winner is likely to come from.
What the record actually says
Twenty long-priced winners across more than 160 runnings is not many. It works out as the exception rather than the rule. There is another number that makes the point even more clearly. On only three occasions has a decade produced more than one winner at $31 or better. We have had one this decade, one last decade, and one the decade before that. So the roughies are not just rare overall, they are spread thin as well. They do not arrive in clusters.
That does not mean it cannot happen. It obviously does. It just means that when you sit down to pick a winner, the horses at the shorter end of the market have carried the race far more often than the ones at the bottom of it.
Why the roughies feel more common than they are
The long-priced winners are the ones we all remember. Viewed winning for Bart Cummings. Michelle Payne on Prince of Penzance, blinkers on, going clear. Knight's Choice at that 100 to one mark. Those are the ones that get replayed, the ones that get talked about for years afterwards. Great days for the connections. Not for me, because I was not on the Prince.
That is exactly the problem. The memorable results are not the typical results. If you build your Cup approach around the hope of catching the next Prince of Penzance, you are building it around something that has happened 20 times in 164 years. Your memory is telling you it is common because those wins stick, while the dozens of winners at sensible odds blur together.
How I use odds in the Cup
I do not treat odds as the only thing. I still want a horse coming out of the Caulfield Cup, the Cox Plate or the Geelong Cup that is ready to peak on the day, rather than one I am hoping will improve and then falls flat because it cannot back up that quickly. Form and preparation come first. But once I have my shortlist, the market is a genuine filter. It tells me where the weight of opinion sits, and history says the winner usually comes from that part of the market.
So use the history as a sense check. If your Cup selection is at a very big price, know that you are backing something that happens rarely, and size your thinking accordingly.
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More from Kingsley
- Why Question Marks Mean You Should Not Take Short Odds
- What Happens If You Back Every Horse in Every Race
- Why I Do Not Take Short Odds in Small Fields
From the full video: Million Dollar Melbourne Cup 2025 Challenge Ep 1 | 7 Key Factors to Find the 2025 Cup Winner
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