One of the most coveted racing prizes in the world, the Melbourne Cup, will be making a pre-race appearance in Hawke's Bay later this year as part of a 10-country global tour.

The Bay has been chosen as one of just four New Zealand destinations to host and display the stunning 18-carat gold 2010 Emirates Melbourne Cup - along with Auckland, Timaru and Cambridge. The destinations were chosen through their links with the cup and the great race.

Back in 1962, the Sir James Wattie-owned horse Even Stevens won both the Caulfield and Melbourne Cups and Sir James proudly brought the cup across the ditch and back to his Hastings home. Even Stevens was the first Kiwi horse to be flown directly to Melbourne for the great race.

Other Kiwi cup-winning horses, like Brew and Xcellent, also had Hawke's Bay connections.

The Victoria Racing Club has been touring the Melbourne Cup for the past eight years and have clocked up some 186,000km.

The latest tour is a celebration of the 150th running of the Melbourne Cup, which will be staged, as is tradition, on the first Tuesday of November.

The cup will arrive in Hawke's Bay (with details of locations to come later) on Saturday 9 October, as part of what a Victorian Racing Club spokesman described as a celebration of the "sporting, cultural and social significance of the race that stops a nation."

The tour, which was launched at a function at Flemington racecourse yesterday, will see the cup hosted in locations including Japan, China, America, England, Singapore and Dubai - with the final legs of its 41,000km journey celebrated in New Zealand and across Australia.

Racing "royalty" accompanying the cup during some legs will be retired long-time chief steward Des Gleeson, Sheila Laxon (the first woman trainer to take the prize) and two-time winning jockeys like Roy Higgins (1965 and 1967) and John Letts (1972 and 1980).