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Ad Kalapour (IRE) ridden by Damien Oliver wins the 2023 Lexus Archer Stakes. Photo by Brett Holburt/Racing Photos

Archer Stakes is on the move

23 August 2024 Written by VRC

Among other key spring racing programming changes for the upcoming 2024 carnival, the Lexus Archer Stakes will now be run on Sofitel Makybe Diva Stakes Day, Saturday 14 September 2024.

The $300,000 Group 3 Lexus Archer Stakes (2500m) features ballot-exempt status for the Lexus Melbourne Cup and has been moved from its previous place on Penfolds Victoria Derby Day.

The change ensures the Lexus Archer Stakes’ continued relevance to the Lexus Melbourne Cup and optimises the program for stayers trying to win a golden ticket into Australia’s most iconic race. We tell the story of the horse who started it all.

It is fitting that the Melbourne Cup story begins with an absolute champion. Archer, the horse named in a bow-and-arrow reference to his sire William Tell, stands tall in the Australian Racing Hall of Fame not just because he won the first two Melbourne Cups but by the manner of his winning.

Both times the stake money was well worth taking, the pre-race speculation was intense and the best horses came from around Australia to compete. Both times Archer carried daunting weights to victory – 60.3kg the first time, 64.4kg the second time. Only Carbine ever won carrying more. Both times Archer demoralised his opposition, winning by six lengths in the first instance, eight lengths the next. Officially this remains the largest winning margin in the history of the race, equalled only by Rain Lover more than a hundred years later, in 1968.

Over the years Archer’s story has generated argument and confusion, not so much around the horse himself and his merits but around the people who bred, owned, trained, and looked after him and rode him in trackwork and in his races, and around how and where he travelled in his racing career. He did travel widely.

Archer, 1861

Names you will read in his story include Tom Roberts who owned Exeter Farm near Braidwood NSW where Archer was foaled in 1856, Roberts’s sister Betsy and brother-in-law Thomas Royds, the Royds’s young sons Edward and William, Betsy’s second husband Rowland Hassall, the horse trainer Etienne de Mestre based at Terrara near Nowra, the trainer’s assistant Tom Lamond, the farriers Patrick Egan and John Rouen and the Sydney jockey John Cutts – which wasn’t his real name anyway.

You’ll read – and may you have even seen in the old movie – that Archer walked all the way from New South Wales to win the Melbourne Cup, but it isn’t true. Luckily for my reputation, the Nowra local historian Keith Paterson in his detailed biography of Etienne de Mestre, The Master’s Touch, confirmed my revelation in 1987 that Archer travelled by ship to Melbourne for both his successful Cup campaigns, each time on the steamer “City of Sydney”.  He went home by ship, too.

Whatever the legalities and moralities around Archer’s origins and ownership, the official record tells an official story. Etienne de Mestre is credited as the owner and trainer of Archer (William Tell – Maid of the Oaks) when he won the two Melbourne Cups. John Cutts was the jockey, wearing de Mestre’s silks: black, black cap. Both times the best Victorian horse of the day, Mormon – who first raced as Praxiteles – was runner-up.

But let’s just talk about the horse himself, Archer. We are fortunate that, unlike many horses from this era, this champion was described in detail and depicted by several of the best equine artists of the time. He was a beautiful horse to paint. Bob Charley’s art book Heroes and Champions includes a private collection portrait by Joseph Fowles. It shows jockey Cutts from behind – standing shorter than the horse’s withers – poised to mount the spirited Archer while de Mestre holds the horse’s bridle, firmly and confidently. Archer is all action.

“A horse of immense size and power,” said Australia’s earliest Stud Book. “A magnificent horse for the eye,” said a local journalist seeing him for the first time before the 1861 Cup. He was certainly big, standing more than 16 hands tall, muscular, a gleaming bay with distinctive black “points” – the colour on the lower legs, mane and tail.

Like many colts growing into stallions, Archer thickened up with maturity. They sometimes called him a “gross feeder”, which meant a good appetite. He put on condition too easily and needed hard training to keep him fully fit. Yet his good temperament was always noted.

Keith Paterson confirms that Archer raced 17 times, at Randwick, Windsor, Flemington, Maitland, Geelong, and Ballarat. Cutts rode him in 16 of these starts, de Mestre once, for 12 wins (9 in succession) and three third placings. His two unplaced runs were his first two starts, at Randwick in 1860 at three years. He was allocated an unprecedented 71.6kg in the 1863 Melbourne Cup but controversially, and probably, fortunately, did not start. His acceptance form arrived a day late – but that is another story. His stud career was said to be unsuccessful, but he died in 1872, too soon to prove himself.

Did the Melbourne Cup make Archer famous, or was it the other way round? Both things are true. The race made a champion. The champion made the race.