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Melbourne Cup-winning jockey Mark Zahra has hilariously called himself a “moron” after he put up two fingers to signify his back-to-back wins shortly after crossing the finish line.
Zahra took out the Caulfield Cup-Melbourne Cup double on Without A Fight ($8.00), finishing over two lengths ahead of the second-placed Soulcombe and the third-placed Sheraz.
Zahra’s win atop Without A Fight comes after he took out last year’s Melbourne Cup on Gold Trip. Following his second consecutive Cup win, he opened up on his two-finger gesture.
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“I reckon winning one helps a lot,” he told 10.
“You’re just so much more confident because if you’ve never won one you’re like, ‘I might never get the chance’. But when you’ve won one you think, ‘If I stuff it up I’ve still got one to go home to’, so it’s not the end of the world. So you can ride with a lot of confidence, and when you’re on a good horse you can also do the same.
“I was standing up and doing this (motions showing two fingers) across the post, I’m like, ‘What are you doing you moron?’.”
Zahra is the first jockey to win consecutive Melbourne Cups since Glen Boss won three in a row on Makybe Diva between 2003 and 2005. He is the 10th jockey to win the Cup in back-to-back years.
The 41-year-old needed to beat his beloved 2022 Melbourne Cup winner Gold Trip to win the race, as he did during the Caulfield Cup last month. He explained how that experienced settled him in the lead-up.
“It was hard for me at the Caulfield Cup and I did think about it, I (saw) him walk past and I gave him a pat, (and I was thinking) he’s my horse, I should be on him,” he admitted.
“I’m glad I had all that go under the bridge and then I beat him and rode in the Cox Plate.
“Today, I walked past him, I still gave him a wink, but I’ve moved right on. My sole focus was to win it again on this horse.”
Without A Fight is the first horse since Ethereal in 2001 to claim the Caulfield Cup-Melbourne Cup double.
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