Michelle Payne celebrates her winning ride with brother and strapper Steven Payne. Credit:Getty Images "She'll be in front with 200 metres to go, hopefully," Steven had predicted, trying not to get ahead of himself. And there it was - all hopes and predictions more than fulfilled, whatever the doubts of the bookies and the punters. He could barely speak. The grin, the leap into the air. It said it all. Such symmetry. Exactly 100 years ago, a Mrs Edith Widdis became the first woman to own a horse that won the Melbourne Cup. Mrs Widdis, from Rosedale in Gippsland, owned Patrobus, which won the 1915 Cup with the number 19 on the blanket - the same number worn by Prince of Penzance on Tuesday. Such a win, too, for trainer Darren Weir, the modest Mallee bloke with Ballarat stables who loves horses so much he employs another young woman to see that any of his equine charges who fall by the wayside, too slow for fast tracks, find new homes. Plenty don't need such tenderness - Weir is Victoria's leading trainer. No new home needed for Prince of Penzance, certainly. The owners, ordinary fellows from the bush, most of them, wouldn't hear of it. Their horse had just brought home $3.6 million and the most desired cup in Australian horse racing.

Michelle Payne putting the bridle on her horse in 2001. At the other end of the fairytale, though, was a tragedy. Red Cadeaux, the old stager that has posted second in an astonishing three Cups, sentimental favourite of the crowd, limped home last, clearly in distress. A green screen was put around him; word went around that it was his left fetlock. Allez Wonder jockey Michelle Payne talks to trainer Bart Cummings before the running of the 2009 Melbourne Cup. Credit:Paul Rovere Tears were shed, the worst imagined, but a vet gave the mercy of pain relief and fashioned a splint and Red Cadeaux was raced away to a veterinary clinic in Werribee, future unknown.

The Melbourne Cup, of course, is rather more than a horse race, despite that roar that went up from 101,015 voices; rival to the first bounce at an AFL grand final, as the field jumped, and the roar that turned to a shriek that you could feel as all those tonnes of horseflesh flung themselves down the final straight to the line. It was about slinky figures in slinkier outfits down among the champagne and the caviar and the air-kissing of the Birdcage; it was about endless queues for sushi and cocktails and beer in the gloom of the undercroft and the sun-soaked lawns; it was chicken and barbecue beneath private tents on the rails, and picnics in the car park. It was the art of balancing upon impossible heels everywhere. Strangely, perhaps, the only place you might have escaped the crush of the crowd was around the horse stalls. Here anyone was welcome to study the runners, search for that special musculature on the haunches that speaks of a thoroughbred at peak, to watch for flared nostrils and rolling eyes and excessive sweat. Yet here, the meaning of a horse racing meeting, you could find free areas of lawn and even a seat. Strappers walked their charges and no more than a line or two crowded the rails.

The Melbourne Cup is what it has always been. A fabulous festival of finery and excess for those who mightn't spend another day at the races all year. It is a day off in search of a fairytale. And on Tuesday, it was that rarest thing: a fairytale actually delivered.