When is Adelaide Cup Day?

A racing holiday for South Australia

Adelaide Cup Day is South Australia's equivalent of Melbourne Cup Day: a public holiday for a horse race, in this case the Adelaide Cup at Morphettville Racecourse. The race was first run in 1864, and the holiday is observed on the second Monday in March. Unlike the Melbourne Cup, which is a Tuesday in metropolitan Melbourne only, Adelaide Cup Day is a Monday and applies across the whole state.

The holiday used to fall in May. It was moved to March in 2006 to give South Australia a long weekend in the autumn, and the race moved with it. That places the holiday in the same week as Labour Day in Victoria and Tasmania and Canberra Day in the ACT.

What the weekend looks like

The long weekend arrives at the tail end of Adelaide's festival season, overlapping with the Adelaide Festival and the Fringe, and the Cup itself is run on the Monday afternoon. Because it sits early in the year, it is often the first chance after Australia Day to add leave: a Friday off before it or a Tuesday after makes a four-day break, and the planner will show whether it lines up usefully with Easter in a given year.

The race itself

The Adelaide Cup is a 3200 metre handicap run by the South Australian Jockey Club at Morphettville. It was a Group 1 race for many years but was reclassified as Group 2 when it moved to March in 2006, a change that drew some criticism from the racing industry at the time. The holiday survived the move, and the day remains the biggest on the South Australian racing calendar.

South Australia and Victoria are the only states with a public holiday tied to a horse race. The Northern Territory's Picnic Day coincides with the Darwin Cup but is not named for it, and Tasmania's cup days in Devonport and Launceston are regional holidays rather than statewide ones.