RACING superstar Rain Lover won a “whopping” $188,100 in his unparalleled track career.
Which included back-to-back Melbourne Cups and an incredible swag of Group 1s, other cups, derbies and blue-ribbon crowns such as the Mackinnon and Underwood, the odd Oaks and the VRC Queen Elizabeth Stakes.
Converted to 2025 values, this racing legend’s take home pay might have topped – just – around $2 million.
Makybe Diva, by comparison, won more than $14 million.
If Rain Lover had started that incredible spell of racing success in 2025, he could have been expected to bank somewhere between $15 million and $20 million.
The winner of this year’s Ballarat Cup, for example, will receive more money than Rain Lover did for his entire career.
Even his trainer Mick Robins can see the funny side of that.
“No question the prize money has gone up a bit since 1968,” he laughed, in the racing understatement of the 21st century.
Robins, Broken Hill born and bred, left the Hill more than 60 years ago to make his name in the racing world and in just a few short years during the 1960s he did that in a way few other trainers have or, probably, ever will.
He took a promising colt called Rain Lover and won the Melbourne Cup in 1968 and again in 1969. Rain Lover was first to take successive cups in more than 100 years and one of only five horses to have achieved more than one since the race was first run in 1861. (If you don’t know the rest they were, in order, Archer, which won the first two, Peter Pan, which won two but with a year in between, Rain Lover, Think Big and Makybe Diva – which won three in a row).
Robins left the Hill in 1962, and he can’t quite remember the last time he made it home, but the 94-year-old (he turns 95 in July) admits four new hips, two new knees and a few unwanted tumbles later, he’s not getting around as well as he once did.
Which has recently seen him in Nhill hospital and now in a nearby care facility as he recovers from his latest fall.
But he still reigns as the oldest living trainer of a Melbourne Cup winner – or two.
And still loves a chat about the good old days, at the Hill and his many, many years in the racing game, a love which extended until he was almost into his 90s, helping out at the stables of Mornington trainer Tony Noonan.
Even while talking to the Broken Hill Times you could hear the racing on his TV going softly in the background.
“It was a tough game, you felt pretty good just to win a race, any race,” he said. “Melbourne Cups were things you dreamed about, things other people won.
“If anyone had said a young bloke from Broken Hill could move to Adelaide, and then to Melbourne to win the cup, I would have thought they were crazy.”
But he recalled sage advice he once received from Bart Cummings.
“He always said to me you have to run in the Mackinnon Stakes, and if you can win that you’ve got a chance at a Melbourne Cup,” Robins recalled.
“When Rain Lover won the 1968 Mackinnon I thought we could really have a shot at winning the cup.”
There goes Robins again with his understatements.
Rain Lover would win that first cup by a staggering eight lengths – matching Archer’s record win and not touched since – and along the way smashed the two-mile (3200m) record at Flemington.
In a twist of fate, Cummings, who would amass a record 12 Melbourne Cups, would be the next trainer to go back-to-back, with Think Big in 1974 and ’75.
While Robins won’t be at the big day in 2025, there’s no missing the connection at the track – the grandstand there is named in his honour.
“I’m heading towards 100 and none too steady these days – they tell me here I am a bit risky if I was in the house alone,” Robins concedes.
“I love racing, and I loved Rain Lover, he was just a freak, and one of the best to ever have a halter on,” he added.
“And even if I can’t be there, I am sure it will be a brilliant day.”
