When the man in the street thinks Australian horse racing, he thinks the Melbourne Cup. And when thoughts turn to the Melbourne Cup, one name rolls off the tongue as naturally as a thoroughbred in full flight: James Bartholomew Cummings.
The trainer would have been regarded a master of his trade even without his record 12 Melbourne Cups. But it is primarily for this reason that Cummings, aka the Cups King, occupied a rarefied space in Australian culture. It’s no exaggeration to say that Cummings was to horse racing what Sir Donald Bradman was to cricket.
And it’s for this reason that Australians of all walks of life, followers of racing not, awoke on Sunday morning to the news of his passing with a sense of loss. Cummings not only transcended his sport, he transcended sport itself.
There was much more to Cummings than his dominance of Flemington on the first Tuesday of November. The South Australian was both prolific and enduring, taking up his licence in 1953 and achieving just about everything he could in the ensuing six decades: 268 Group 1 wins (two as co-trainer with his grandson James), 700-plus stakes victories, Golden Slippers, Cox Plates. We even put his face, bushy eyebrows and all, on a stamp.
But Cummings’s isn’t a story of effortless accomplishment. One doesn’t stay afloat in a sport as capricious as horse racing without determination, and were it not for his iron will Cummings could have been lost to the sport several times over.
In fact, it could have been over before it even began. As a teenager growing up near the stables of his father Jim, Cummings couldn’t go near a horse without breaking out in a rash. Doctors told him he should stay away from horses if he wanted to avoid chronic asthma and allergies for the rest of his life.
That was Bart, the boy who thumbed his nose at medical advice when others might have changed course and sought an office job. As a young man, Cummings went two years without training a single winner, but refused to give in. This resolve was again to the fore when the recession of the 1990s left Cummings millions of dollars in debt and facing bankruptcy. It would have crushed a lesser soul, but in the end Cummings crushed it. “I always look on the bright side of everything. If you keep aiming for some goal, you usually get there if you don’t give up,” he once said.
So Cummings was an achiever and a fighter. But if he was a man of substance, he was also one of personality. If his accomplishments on the track made us admire him, his larger-than-life character, his brutal honesty and dry wit, compelled us to love him.
His post-race interviews were must-see affairs. After Saintly won the 1996 Melbourne Cup, a reporter remarked that Bart had a tear in his eye. “Yeah,” Cummings responded. “I didn’t have enough on it.” Over the years, Cummings’s affinity with the Melbourne Cup became almost mystical. In his pomp, Cummings could send out a midweek winner over 2,400m and it would be talked up as a potential for the Flemington two-miler.
Cummings was also unapologetically pro-Australian. He was dead against the internationalisation of the Melbourne Cup, which these days is commonplace but 20 years ago was seen by some as an invasion.
“It is much easier for the foreigners to qualify,’’ Cummings once said. “It is becoming very one-sided and they are pandering to the internationals. If they keep going like this, we will have to “spot the Aussie” in the Cup.’’
Cummings was unmoved by the kudos of success on the international stage and thus never campaigned his horses overseas. When asked about English racing, he was dismissive. “The racing over there isn’t worth two bob.”
Without the thoroughbred, of course, Cummings would have been just another man with an opinion. But his tutelage of the racehorse, particularly stayers, was unrivalled. He handled some of the greats of the Australian turf, but in true showman style saved the best for last. So You Think was not one of Bart’s 12 Melbourne Cup winners, but in the trainer’s view he’d never had one better.
A dual winner of the Cox Plate, Australasia’s premier weight-for-age race, and virtually untouchable in the spring of 2010, So You Think was thereafter sold and sent to pre-eminent Irish trainer Aidan O’Brien. Cummings said the sale left him a “broken man”.
Not that it stopped him giving advice from the other side of the world when So You Think’s first European campaign failed to live up to expectations. In the end, O’Brien listened and So You Think went on to win as many Group 1s in Europe as he did in Australia. “The thing was, I knew Bart had been doing a better job than me. You have to learn,” O’Brien said.
It’s unlikely O’Brien had spoken such words about a peer beforehand, and it’s doubtful he ever will again. But he was talking about Bart Cummings, a mould-breaker whose legacy as the king of Australia’s greatest horse race lives on.
