If you continue to throw enough money at something you usually get the desired results.

About 25 years ago, the Victoria Racing Club came up with a vision to attract some of the best-staying horses in the Northern Hemisphere to run in the Melbourne Cup.

The huge stake of $7m last Tuesday, resulted in ten of the 24 starters coming from English or Irish stables with a Japanese contender for good measure.

First run in 1861, the first hundred years of the Melbourne Cup saw a New Zealand assault on the big prize run on the First Tuesday in November. The initial New Zealand bred winner was Martini Henry in 1883, with 42 subsequent winners being born in the Shaky Isles.

The immortal Phar Lap won the Cup in 1930 and has always been looked upon as the mark in Melbourne Cup racing history. Wotan travelled from Wanganui in 1936, to stun the crowd, taking out the Cup as a 100-1 outsider.

Whakatane owned Rising Fast was a champion stayer, with the 1954 Melbourne Cup the pinnacle of an outstanding racing career. During the spring of 1954 Rising Fast became the only horse to annex the Caulfield Cup, Cox Plate and Melbourne Cup in the same season.

Rising Fast was born in the thoroughbred breeding backwater of Greytown in the Wairarapa and sold at the 1950 National Sales, to first time race horse owner Leicester R Spring.

Spring was well-known Eastern Bay of Plenty identity who established and operated the Whakatane Beacon, which is still family-owned today.

Leicester Spring was also an extremely talented cricket player, who is the first entry in the Bay of Plenty Cricket history book of six wickets in a match, returning 6/55 for Bay of Plenty against Manawatu in a 1940 Hawke Cup Direct Challenge match.

The 1960 Centennial Melbourne Cup saw Hi Jinx win the Cup in a kiwi trifecta. New Zealand owned and trained horses continue to plunder the spoils across the ditch with Even Steven and Polo Prince successful in the early 1970's.

Baghdad Note and Van der Hum made the race there own, later in the 1970's – and what New Zealand racing tragic can't forget Kiwi storming from last to victory in 1983.

After Empire Rose in 1988, the list of New Zealand owned and trained horses slowed to a trickle with just Jezabeel in 1998 and Ethereal the last New Zealand owned and trained winner in 2001.

A million dollar stake for the first time in 1985, raised the bar, with Melbourne Crown Casino owner Lloyd Williams What A Nuisance the first of his six winners.

Since the start of the new Millennium the trickle of Northern Hemisphere and Japanese contenders has turned into a flood.

An example of throwing money at the Melbourne Cup to attract the best possible field in the world, is shown by the 1967 race, which this writer was part on the 100,000 plus crowd.

The 1967 Melbourne Cup had a stake of 60,000 dollars with the winning connections to receive $41,300 and a Gold Cup valued at two thousand dollars. While the rate of inflation over the last five decades would have driven the prize-money to around one million dollars, the steroid-like increase, has taken the stake to seven times the rate of inflation in the same period.

A vast majority of punters have lost money on the big race – though the good news is that it is just 51 weeks to the 2019 Melbourne Cup.