‘What have I just done’ – Jamie Melham’s formula for history-making Melbourne Cup success

Jamie Melham’s historic Melbourne Cup success aboard Half Yours was driven by the emotion of the recent deaths of two major influences of her career, a lifetime connection with the horse’s trainers, and her courage and determination at the most important moments of the race.

Melham may not have been wearing the colours of Half Yours’ late breeder Colin McKenna, but she carried a pin on her riding vest with the blue and green hoops which became synonymous with success over the past 20 years.

A little more than 12 months since McKenna’s death, the emotion is still real for Melham, who described him as her greatest advocate. One of her other great supporters, her grandfather Arthur, also died recently.

“Janice (McKenna’s wife) gave me the pin this morning,” she said.

“A big shout out to my grandpa up there as well. He watched the Caulfield Cup, that was the last thing he did before he passed away, and now he’s up again watching me.

“I can’t go to his funeral on Thursday, but I’m sure he’d rather me to be here and provide some more winners for him.”

The sacrifices made were a theme for Melham as she reflected on her greatest success.

She shared a moment with her good friend Michelle Payne, the only other person on course who knows what it takes to be a woman who has ridden a Melbourne Cup winner.

Melham also embraced her Mum Karen in the mounting yard, repeating the words “what have I just done”?

While Half Yours started close to favourite for the race, the shock was understandable, after a roller-coaster ride to this point.

At the same track two-and-half years ago, Melham nearly lost her life in a fall. Other “indiscretions” have led her to be arguably the most scrutinised jockey in the land.  

There have been critics suggest that she hasn’t showed the same nerve since her return from injury. She proved them all wrong with a daring ride to claim Tuesday’s race.     

But in a sport of moments, Melham must have briefly thought her luck had once again run out.

As she searched for inside runs rounding the bend, she found herself caught behind two tiring horses, Arapaho and Smokin’ Romans.

Melham knew that her husband Ben was aboard Smokin’ Romans, but she gave only a second’s thought as she pushed through the gap, leaving him in her wake.

“There was a gap this big next to him, and I was going to yell at him, but my horse was just going too good anyway and pulled me through the gap, and pulled me through the next gap, which there was barely any room there,” she said.

That gap, between Royal Supremacy and the one-time runaway leader Land Legend, and was even smaller than the first, but with momentum on her side, Melham and Half Yours squeezed through.

“When a horse is going that well, it just takes you where it needs to go, and Tony and Calvin, they’ve got this horse so fit, there was definitely no question about it running out of shape today, so they put that to bed very quickly,” she said.

It was a jockey-trainer partnership forged in Adelaide in 2012, when a kid from the Adelaide Hills was making a major impression.

“We were training a lot of winners in Adelaide, and then this young girl just kept knocking us off all the time and beating us, and I was trying to sort out a way of how do we beat her, and there’s the old saying, if you can’t beat them, join them, and so we tried to get Jamie to come on board with us,” Tony McEvoy said.

“She was just lengths ahead of everybody in Adelaide, and was a star of the future, and look at her go, and it’s just incredibly special to have her win this race for us.”

Melham has ridden more winners for the McEvoys than any other trainer, 86 for Tony when he was out on his own, and now 14 for the father-son training partnership. It was a hell of way to bring up a century.

“My first Melbourne winner was with them on Dollar For Dollar (on Melbourne Cup day in 2017). I had my first Adelaide Group 1 winner with them (Coco Sun), my 100th winner in the season. There’s a few milestones,” she said.

It was far from the first time the McEvoy name had won a Melbourne Cup. Tony’s nephew Kerrin has won three of them in the saddle, while Tony’s brother Phillip was a part-owner of the 2005 runner-up On A Jeune.

But the McEvoy stable had not had a Cup runner in 23 years, since Tony was in charge of Lindsay Park. Amazingly it is the second year in a row that a Cup-winning trainer had that exact same gap between runners after Sheila Laxon’s success last year.

Shortly after last year’s Cup, along came Half Yours, via an Inglis Digital sale, where Calvin kept bidding to $300,000 and Tony kept trying to get him to stop.

HerStory 🤩@jamieleemelham becomes the first female jockey ever to complete the Cups double, guiding HALF YOURS to victory in the 2025 Lexus Melbourne Cup.

🎥 @wwos | #MelbourneCup | #MelbCupCarnival pic.twitter.com/1PXMggTqVV

— Victoria Racing Club (@FlemingtonVRC) November 4, 2025

The humbly bred son of St Jean gave Tony the chance to show his love of training stayers.

“Look, it’s the Melbourne Cup, it is a race that stops the nation for a reason, and I think I’ve actually said it quite often, I think before Cal’s come on board, I think I’ve been perceived as a speed, two year old fillies trainer, and Cal’s been associated with that because he’s come on board,” he said.

“What it’s done for us is probably given us a bit of an unbalanced string, we haven’t been able to afford to go and buy the bigger European horses.

“I’m hoping this Caulfield Cup and this Melbourne Cup will change people’s mindset on that, and maybe we can get involved in some of these European stayers now, and it will give us a much more balanced string.

“I love training stayers, I’ve trained a Grand National Steeple winner, and we get a great joy out of training stayers, speed is speed, and you just put them out there and away they go, and these take a little bit more work and a little bit more finessing, and I think this horse has shown everyone that we can manage a stayer, and we’d love more of them.”

The other piece of history concerns the origin of Half Yours, the only Australian-bred horse in the race. It is the first time since 2009 that Australian-bred horses have won back-to-back editions of the Melbourne Cup and the first time since 1939 that an Aussie-bred horse has won the Caulfield and Melbourne Cup double.

St Jean, who has produced just 22 runners to the track from four crops of racing age, joins his sire Teofilo (three times) as a Cup-winning sire. Teofilo’s own legendary sire Galileo has now had 40 runners in the race without success.