MELBOURNE, Oct 22: Makybe Diva won Saturday’s Cox Plate, the Australian leg of the World Racing Championship, to enhance her reputation as one of the country’s greatest race horses.

The seven-year-old mare stormed home to add Australia’s weight-for-age championship (2,040 metres) to her stunning list of achievements and surpass New Zealand mare Sunline as Australasia’s greatest stakes winner, lifting her career earnings past A$11.4 million ($8.6 million).

Makybe Diva is already one of just four horses to have twice won the Melbourne Cup, Australia’s richest race, and will start a clear favourite to make it three in a row if she enters the 2005 race as expected on November 1.

“She’s such a great horse, I don’t think this country has seen a better horse over the past 30 to 40 years,” trainer Lee Freedman told Australian television.

Ridden by her regular jockey Glenn Boss, Makybe Diva settled near the rear of the field and circled a wall of horses approaching the home turn then sprinted away to beat Lotteria by a length and a quarter with 2003 Cox Plate winner Fields of Omagh third.

“There’s nothing she can’t do, it’s freaky what she does,” Boss said.

Makybe Diva became the first horse to win two Melbourne Cups and a Cox Plate, but her owner, tuna fisherman Tony Santic, has still not decided whether she will contest a third Melbourne Cup.

The Melbourne Cup, run over a gruelling 3,200 metres, is contested under handicap conditions and as a two-time winner, Makybe Diva will have to break a host of weight-carrying records to win.

“No-one’s going to make a decision tonight,” Freedman said. “We just want to savour this moment first and see how she recovers then we’ll all sit down and talk about it.”—Reuters