A carrot cake fit for a Melbourne Cup champion was on the menu as the city’s museum celebrated Phar Lap’s 90th birthday with a giant mural of the iconic much-loved racehorse.

Born in New Zealand on October 4, 1926, as a yearling Phar Lap never showed much promise.

But between September 1929 and November 1932, he won 37 of 51 races, including the 1930 Melbourne Cup.

Hundreds of people on Tuesday stood outside the Melbourne Museum to create an image of the racehorse’s head, before the real thing – preserved in a glass case and on display inside the museum – was presented with a giant cake.

Museum curator Michael Reason said the story of Phar Lap’s rise to the top during hard times still held a special place in the hearts of Australians.

“It was sort of the right horse at the right time because it was the Great Depression and most people were doing it tough,” he said.

“It was a fairytale, feel-good story that people could follow and think of him as their champion.”

Jim Pike and Phar Lap take to the track at Flemington. Photo: Charles Pratt, courtesy State Library of Victoria

Visiting Phar Lap ‘a rite of passage’ for Victorian kids

“It’s become a sort of Melbourne icon, and a part of growing up in Melbourne. People bring their children and their grandchildren along to see him, people visit him at school,” Mr Reason said.

He said one of the reasons Phar Lap remained one of the museum’s most popular attractions was the quality of his preservation by the best taxidermists of the time in New York.

“[It] was done with such skill,” Mr Reason said.

“People say when they walk in, ‘he looks alive’, and he certainly does.

“They took the job so seriously they actually went to a local racetrack and studied horses racing to see if they could actually transfer that in the work they were doing.”

We may never know how champion died

The mystery and theories surrounding Phar Lap’s death have also added to the charm of the champion horse.

Phar Lap is still one of Melbourne Museum’s most popular exhibits. Photo: ABC

“News took quite a while to filter down here, so when he went off to America and just died in mysterious circumstances people didn’t know what was happening,” Mr Reason said.

“He’d won the top race in North America and won against the best horses in the world. To people it seemed very suspicious.”

The basic autopsy methods in 1932 meant there was no conclusive cause of death – was Phar Lap poisoned or did he die of natural causes?

“There’s also the theory it was an accidental poisoning because racehorses were fed a number of different tonics and given lotions that did contain things you wouldn’t use today,” Mr Reason said.

“One was a pick-me-up tonic that contained small levels of arsenic.

“It’s a mystery I don’t think we’ll ever solve but it adds to the whole magic of it.”

-ABC