After some difficult times, the 2023 Melbourne Cup Carnival was a ‘huge success’ according to Victoria Racing Club CEO Steve Rosich
Australia: A total of 84,400 racefans and revellers packed Flemington on the first Tuesday in November to see Without A Fight, a former European-trained horse, trounce a field of 22 rivals for the honour taking the most prized trophy in Australian racing, the Lexus Melbourne Cup.
Did the race run true to the old cliche and stop the nation? Probably not the entire country, but there were still many millions who thought it a good idea to place a bet and watch, just the same.
Yes, a bet … on a Tuesday. Usually, you need to be hardened and – dare one suggest it? – a little desperate to stop your normal daily routine to splash your cash on a two-mile Flat handicap early in the week.
But not of you live in Australia, where that’s still the norm for a multitude every November. For Aussies, it’s as regular as Thanksgiving; in Melbourne, Cup day is even a public holiday.
That said, in today’s hyper-sensitive society, we are constantly reminded of the pitfalls attached. Every betting show on Racing.com (the racing TV station in Melbourne) features the warning: ‘Chances are you are about to lose’ or asks ‘What else could you be buying?’
Breathtakingly parochial
Australia is a vast country – and breathtakingly parochial. The Melbourne-Sydney ‘war’ has been going on since the first Europeans arrived to establish settlements in what are now the capital cities of Victoria and New South Wales.
On the racing front, In a relatively new approach to the ongoing conflict, Sydney decided to program a A$3m ($1.97m/£1.57m) race on Melbourne Cup Day. The Flemington feature is worth A$8m ($5.26m/£4.2m) but it was still a direct clash.
The Big Dance, which is the name of the race, has special conditions and is run over one mile at Randwick. Tanks were clearly parked on the lawn.
Indeed, there was even a suggestion that Sydney might stage a A$3m two-mile handicap on the same day as the Cup – the same race, in effect. Thankfully, somebody, somewhere, saw sense and stopped short.
The Covid pandemic has left its mark on so many aspects of life worldwide. People have suffered, so too businesses and industries and racing is no exception. The only consolation is that governments permitted racing to carry on behind closed doors, and with nothing better to do in that blank period, punters pumped multi-millions into betting. Turnover went through the roof and racing prospered; now, there has been a reality check.
Biggest crowd since 2017
It has taken time but attendances have been increasing gradually, to the point that it felt like pre-Covid levels were within reach. A total of 262,000 attended the four days of the Melbourne Cup Carnival at Flemington, which represented growth of 7% year-on-year. The Cup Day crowd was the biggest since the Joseph O’Brien-trained Rekindling won in 2017.
Which is where Steve Rosich comes in. Rosich is the CEO of the Victoria Racing Club, which runs Flemington and the Melbourne Cup Carnival. Unsurprisingly, he hails the four days – also featuring the Victoria Derby, VRC Oaks and Mackinnon Stakes, plus sundry other good races – as a “huge success”.
Rosich points to a different approach to crowd levels, much of it taken from the Covid experience. “We had one year, 2020, with no crowd,” he explains, “then we had 35,000 spread over the four days in 2021, while in 2022 it was nearly back, with 240,000.
“But we are looking to focus on the experience at Flemington,” he goes on. “We are looking to cap out at 90,000. We would like the crowd to be able to move around and enjoy easy access to food and beverage, to be able to sit and relax and enjoy the day, even with numbers in the mid-80,000s.”
Rosich, 53, trained as a chartered accountant and came to the biggest job in Australian racing via a long and successful career in Aussie Rules football. He looks at racing’s finances with fresh eyes and his observations at the VRC are interesting.
“It is a business operation that has revenue of A$225m ($148m/£118m) and almost half of that is earned during the Melbourne Cup Carnival,” he says. “It’s been great to have a long-term grounding in AFL and to move to what is an exceptional industry and it goes beyond Flemington and racing. This is a major event we are putting on at Flemington, every year in early November, and this year has been a huge success.
Significant achievement
“Over 33,000 members is the largest racing membership club in the world and also a record for the VRC,” Rosich goes on. “That’s a significant achievement over the past few years, given that we have come out of a restricted Covid period. For our members to not only stay with the Club but to grow that has been significant and that support has been matched by a wonderful group of sponsors and partners.“
Flemington boasts one of the finest members’ clubhouses built in modern times – albeit at a cost running into millions during a more prosperous period for the country. With that in mind, the bleak years of no crowds and consequently a total lack of on-course revenue from hospitality and dining has left the VRC with plenty of ground to make up.
“There’s no doubt our board and management team have had a financial challenge over the past three years,” Rosich admits. “We’ve had great support from the industry due to the extraordinary wagering numbers we have generated, and that’s flowed to grants we received to help manage our operations and our debt.”
He continues: “We took an approach during Covid to still maintain prize-money at a significant level, to invest in Flemington and the experience on course, despite having restricted crowds, with the view that if we did that, it would assist with the retention of sponsors, partners and members — and that has played out.
“We are carrying more debt post-Covid but as we look ahead now after a successful Carnival, we have a continued focus on management costs and investment and some significant growth prospects on the horizon. We are very positive about our financial future.”
Captures the imagination
Asked for his highlight of the Carnival, Rosich nominates the win of Sheikh Mohammed Obaid’s Without A Fight in the Melbourne Cup. “The build-up and the anticipation generated by the Cup captures the imagination of the country,” he says. “For 163 years it has stopped a nation.”
Without A Fight ran as an English-trained import when 13th to Gold Trip in 2022 for Simon & Ed Crisford. Switched to another father-son combination, Anthony & Sam Freedman in Australia, he came back to not only win on his second attempt at the Melbourne Cup but also the Caulfield Cup, another G1 handicap, on the way through.
Rosich is adamant international competition is essential for the success of the Cup and other races throughout the Spring Carnival. “International competition, particularly in the Melbourne Cup, is a fundamental,” he says. “It will always be our intention to attract the very best owners and trainers and horses from around the world.
“We are trying to capture global interest so it’s important we have international participants. Amazingly, 30-35% of attendees over the four days of the Carnival will come from outside the state of Victoria and a large number of those are from overseas.”
Steve Rosich spells it out – from the AFL to CEO at the VRC
Aussie Rules football is like a religion in the southern half of Australia. The states of Victoria, South Australia and West Australia have long been strongholds of a game devised in the 19th century to give a bunch of out-of-season cricketers something to do, lest their inactivity led to gross unfitness that would see them disadvantaged when it came time to don their whites and pad up for the ‘real’ game in high summer.
To the uneducated eye, Aussie Rules is a game loosely modelled on rugby but with more kicking of the ball.
In some parts of the world, you ask a new acquaintance where they grew up, what school they went to, what university? In Melbourne or Perth, the first question is usually ‘Who do you barrack for? (Translation: ‘Which team do you follow in the AFL?’)
It was from this background that Perth-born and -raised Steve Rosich, the CEO of the Victoria Racing Club, came. A talented schoolboy footballer, he played alongside Justin Langer, later an Australian Test cricketer and coach, at the local Warwick Football Club, a team so dominant they won seven premierships on the trot.
Rosich was recruited by football scouts on the lookout for future young stars in the West Australian football league, based in Perth. He played a handful of games for top teams Subiaco and West Perth before injury cut short his footballing career at the age of only 20.
With a passion for sport, in particular Aussie Rules, the next step was to find a job that would fit a young sports nut whose ambition was boundless.
He went about it methodically, with a long-range plan, training as a chartered accountant, joining Deloittes and working for them in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne. It was in the latter city that he sensed the best opportunity. “Always the intention was to get back to Melbourne at some stage to pursue the best professional career I could,” he explains.
It took some time to pull it off. Rosich spent four years with the West Coast Eagles, one of two Perth-based teams in the Australian Football League (AFL), before heading across town to join rivals Fremantle Dockers for the next 16 years, the last 12 as CEO.
To put it in perspective, AFL is the most significant commercial sporting landscape in Australia. With a total of 18 teams spread across five of the seven states, It is regularly rated third or fourth in the world for average match-day attendance.
“It was a great opportunity to be a CEO at such a young age,” says Rosich. “To work with great people and really grow that club to be a successful operation off the field and also to perform well on the field. We were unlucky to lose the Flag [the premiership title] in 2013, and we were minor premiers [top of the league at the end of the home and away rounds] in 2015.”
It was in 2019 that racing came knocking – Melbourne racing at that, home of the Melbourne Cup, which remains Australia’s most coveted sporting prize with a 163-year tradition.
Rosich found himself on the VRC radar, with then-chairman Amanda Elliott and CEO Neil Wilson approaching him to move east across the continent with his family – Melbourne is 4½ hours by plane from Perth – with an enticing offer.
The dream position had come to fruition and moving from the AFL environment to the VRC was momentous. “I was delighted to move to the sporting and entertainment capital of Australia,” says Rosich.
“It has one of the biggest sporting entertainment markets in the world, and it’s a privilege and a great responsibility to lead the executive, management and staff of the VRC, which has a huge responsibility to not only preserve the history of Flemington but also the Melbourne Cup Carnival.”
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