On a day dominated by talk of English, Irish and French horses and how they are hijacking Australia's greatest race, one "foreigner" will pack up after next Tuesday's Melbourne Cup is run, never to return to Flemington.

This year's Cup will be the last broadcast by the BBC and probably one of the final race calls ever for its pioneering Australian commentator Jim McGrath.

The decision to cease broadcasting the Cup follows the BBC's withdrawal earlier this year from covering British racing on radio and the end of its television coverage the previous year.

McGrath has called the race for the past 20 years for BBC Radio 5 which broadcasts it live and then replays it on the World Service.

For McGrath the end of the BBC's Cup coverage is a significant moment in a career that has taken him from the back of the grandstands at Flemington and Caulfield where he'd practise his calls into a tape recorder, to Royal Ascot where he received the official imprimatur of the Queen to call the races at her track.

McGrath, the son of popular rails bookie, the late Brian McGrath, left Australia in 1973 to work on the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong where he became the chief racing writer.

During the closed season in Hong Kong he would go to Ireland and call races at Phoenix Park in Dublin before joining the Racing Post newspaper in the UK at its inception in 1986.

"I'd always had an ambition to be involved in English racing, I loved it," McGrath said.

Starting on the bottom rung at the Racing Post, McGrath moved through the ranks at the paper and as a broadcaster and in 1997 took over at the BBC from its legendary racing commentator Sir Peter O'Sullevan.

In the meantime, he'd also joined the Daily and Sunday Telegraph newspapers in London where he assumed the nom de plume of Hotspur, succeeding another British racing institution, Lord John Oaksey.

"Oaksey rode in 11 Grand Nationals and finished second one year on Carrickberg," McGrath recalled.

"He weighed in and came straight to the press room in his jodhpurs and wrote a magnificent story of the race for the Sunday Telegraph.

"He and O'Sullevan were legends, so to take over from them is something I'm pretty proud of."

As the BBC's senior commentator, McGrath completely changed the face of race broadcasting in the UK and Ireland which until then had contained almost no description beyond the first three or four runners and no detail at all.

McGrath will continue in his journalistic roles and on the British television show At The Races.