For over fifty years, the Cups King, Bart Cummings, has been at the forefront of Australian horse racing. With over 250 Group One victories and more than 690 stakes victories the Adelaide born trainer is one of the most iconic names in world horse racing and one of Australia’s best known trainers.

Early life and career

James Bartholomew Cummings was born and raised in Adelaide and after finishing high school he went to work for his father, Jim, at his stables. Cummings took out his own training licence in 1953 using his father’s Adelaide stables.

Cummings’ first Group One win was with Stormy Passage in the SAJC Derby in 1958.

Own stables

Cummings established his own stables, Saintly Place, at Flemington in 1968. This remains his Melbourne headquarters today, although his training operations are run from his Leilani Lodge stables at Randwick, established in 1975.

The Melbourne Cup

Cummings is the most successful trainer in Melbourne Cup history. He won his first Cup in 1965 with Light Fingers but really made his name by training the winners of the Cup in the two subsequent years. Galilee win in 1966 and Red Handed triumphed in ‘the race that stops a nation’ in 1967.

The legendary trainer has since trained the Melbourne Cup winner a further nine times, most recently with Viewed in 2008, which was Cummings’ 250^th Group One winner.

In 1965, 1966, 1974, 1975, and 1991, Cummings trained both the first and second place winners in the Melbourne Cup.

Other successes

Cummings’ other training accomplishments are simply too lengthy to list. Some of his most proud achievements are:

• Scoring seven Group Cup wins when he trained the winners of the Melbourne, Caulfield, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Sandown and Queens Cups with four different horses in 1966/7
• Training the winner of the Golden Slipper four times to date and winning the premier Group One sprint race at Flemington, the Newmarket Handicap, a record 8 times, most recently with Shaftesbury Avenue in 1991
• Training nine Champion Racehorse of the Years including Dayana, Leilani, Maybe Mahal, Hyperno and, most recently, Saintly
• In 1974, Bart was the first trainer in Australia to train the earners of over one million dollars in prize money
• Winning the trainers premiership in 1989/90 in three different states, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, the first time it had been done

Honours

Cummings was honoured with the Order of Australia in1982 and was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1991. He was also an inaugural inductee to the Racing Hall of Fame in 2001.

In 2004, Cummings also became the first trainer to receive the honour of ‘Lifetime Membership’ to the Victoria Racing Club (VRC). The VRC also re-named the 2,500m open handicap race previously known as ‘The Banjo Paterson’ race, ‘The Bart Cummings’, which appropriately, is a Melbourne Cup qualifying race.

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