McIntyre entered two former racehorses that she has retrained, Precedence and Caravan Rolls On, in a couple of categories and won the Retraining of Racehorses In-Hand Class with the former, while Molloy was successful in the Ridden Class with Ideal Strategy.
Given the virtual status of this year’s event, all McIntyre and Molloy had to do was submit a photo of their horses in their respective disciplines and await judgment.
McIntyre vividly recalls sitting in her living room, in anything but regal attire, eagerly awaiting the results.
“All we literally had to do was submit a photo. You just went online and uploaded a photo,” she said.
“They judged the final live, so I sat up in my lounge room with my laptop. They had a host and the judge went through the placings in reverse order from 10th and when he got to the final three he gave a bit more detail as to why he selected the horses that he did.
“When he announced who had finished second, I knew that Precedence had won.”
Nigel Hollings, who judged Precedence’s section, said the bay gelding ticked all the boxes.
“A stunning horse, full of quality and limb, which immediately caught my attention,” was how Hollings described the son of Zabeel, who is a horse well-known to anyone with as much as a passing interest in racing.
Now 16 years old, Precedence raced across eight seasons and twice won the Moonee Valley Cup, but is best remembered as a horse who ran in the Melbourne Cup on four occasions, including being Bart Cummings’ final runner in the race that he won a record 12 times.
Precedence has been with McIntyre since the day after his final start, in the 2015 Sandown Cup, and she is proud of the way he has adapted to life after racing.