The Melbourne Cup betting phenomenon – 70,000 bets a minute and $250 million in turnover

The Melbourne Cup jumps at Flemington on Tuesday as the holder of a record no other Australian race comes near.

Last year the race generated $247.4 million in wagering turnover, according to the Victoria Racing Club, a 16.4 per cent rise on 2024 and clear of the $225.8 million recorded in 2021 and $226 million in 2022.

The 10-race meeting drew $382.5 million, edging past the $375.6 million set in 2021.

This year’s race is also the first Cup since the NSW TAB, SuperTAB and UniTAB pools merged as One Pool on October 2. The three separate dividends the race has carried are gone, and every tote punter in the country now bets into a single pool.

George Julius’s mechanical totalisator, first installed at Auckland’s Ellerslie in 1913, made its Cup debut in 1931, and the Victorian TAB began off-course operations in March 1961.

By the late 2000s the tote was still the centre of Cup betting. Tabcorp reported $95.6 million on the 2009 race across NSW and Victoria, then a record $98.1 million in 2010, when So You Think started at $3 and ran third behind Americain.

But punter behaviour has changed and NSW and Victorian TAB pools on the Cup fell from about $95 million in 2009 to less than $54 million in 2024.

The Cup still brings the tote to life on the day. More than $89 million went through the three totes on the race last year, with $27.7 million in the trifecta and $21.7 million in the win pool.

That data will be closely watched this year as One Pool takes effect for the first time.

In the ring, Mark Read, the bookmaker and punter who founded International All Sports, traced his own fixation to 1966, when a $370,000 collect came from his mother Mabel’s bet on Galilee for the Caulfield Cup–Melbourne Cup double, including a $20,000 single bet on the day.

“The total prize money for the Melbourne Cup in 1966 was $60,000 so that just shows you how big the betting was back in the ’60s and ’70s in a relative sense,” Read told The Straight in 2024.

In 1984 Read turned punter at the Cup-eve call of the card and backed the George Hanlon-trained Black Knight to collect $960,000. The public followed him, and Peter Cook brought the lightweight home as a 10/1 chance.

“The Melbourne Cup was my domain and in the halcyon days of the call of the card I used it as a massive public relations opportunity because it got massive coverage in the press,” Read said.

Racing Victoria’s domestic series shows turnover on the race climbing from $188.9 million in 2019 to $221.6 million in 2020 and $225.8 million in 2021, before holding at $226 million in 2022. It then slipped to $215.7 million in 2023 and $214 million in 2024, a period RV linked to cost-of-living pressures and a cut in bookmaker generosities.

Even at that low point, the 2024 race drew five times the domestic turnover of any other Australian race, and every operator surveyed by The Straight for its ranking of the biggest betting races put the Cup first.

On Cup eve, Racing Victoria chief executive Aaron Morrison said the Cup generates seven times more turnover than any other race.

Last year’s rebound came largely through the app. Sportsbet recorded its biggest Cup in company history, peaking at 69,293 bets a minute with 1.3 million bettors across the day.

Read has long argued the race depends on remaining a genuine handicap.

“The Melbourne Cup has got scale and the handicap is what makes it and it should be put on a pedestal as a betting event,” he said. “The history of the race is all about the betting.”