The glorious spring carnival hits fever pitch this Saturday. While Sydney has its Everest, it’s also the start of Melbourne’s “Big Three”.

It’s the 148th Caulfield Cup, that time-honoured and most important of lead-ups to the very big one, the Melbourne Cup, on the first Tuesday of November (with the middle pin of the huge trio being the Cox Plate in between).

First run in 1879, Caulfield’s is the country’s second-biggest Cup, a great handicap over the classic distance of 2400m, or a mile-and-a-half in old-speak.

Though training methods and rules of thumb have changed a lot in the past couple of decades, it’s still the most important lead-up race to Australia’s greatest race, at Flemington 17 days later.

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