Makybe Diva: The Unwanted Foal Who Owned the Melbourne Cup

In 1999, a chestnut filly went through a British foal sale and nobody wanted her. No bid met the reserve. She was shipped to Australia almost as an afterthought, tagging along with her dam because her owner didn't quite know what else to do with her. Six years later, that same filly pulled up in front of more than 100,000 people at Flemington having done something no horse before or since has managed: won the Melbourne Cup three years running.

That horse was Makybe Diva, and the Racing.com feature embedded above digs into exactly how an unsold foal became the biggest name in Australian racing. It's a story built as much around the jockey as the horse — Glen Boss, who rode her to all three Cups and remains the only jockey to have won the race three times on the same animal.

Three Cups, three different weights

What the video lays out is the scale of the ask. Makybe Diva won the 2003 Cup carrying 51kg, backed it up in 2004 under 55.5kg, then returned in 2005 lumping a brutal 58kg — the heaviest weight any Cup winner had carried since Think Big in 1975. Handicappers pile weight onto proven horses precisely to level the field out; the system is built to stop this exact thing from happening. She did it anyway, three times, against fields stacked to bring her undone.

She was owned by Tony Šantić, a Port Lincoln tuna fisherman who named her by stitching together the first two letters of five of his staff members — Maureen, Kylie, Belinda, Diane and Vanessa. Between 2003 and her retirement moments after the 2005 Cup — announced by Šantić on course, on the spot — she also collected the Cox Plate, the Australian Cup and the Sydney Cup, finishing as the highest stakes-earner in Australian racing history at the time, with well over $14 million in prizemoney.

Why a three-peat is so hard to repeat

The video's central point is really a punter's point: this wasn't a fluke of soft opposition. The Melbourne Cup is a two-mile handicap specifically designed to bring the best horse in the race back to the pack through weight. Winning it once against that format is a genuine achievement. Winning it three years straight, carrying more weight each time, against three completely different fields, is the kind of outlier that statisticians would call noise if it hadn't happened in full view of the country. Makybe Diva passed away earlier this year at 26, but the record hasn't been threatened since, and nothing currently racing looks like touching it soon.

For punters, the takeaway isn't nostalgia for its own sake — it's a reminder of how hard weight-for-age and handicap systems work to level a field, and how rare it is for one horse to beat that system more than once, let alone three times. Form, weight and market respect all matter for a reason: they're the tools racing uses to make outcomes uncertain. Makybe Diva is simply proof of what happens on the rare occasion a horse is good enough to beat all three at once.