The Big Book of Australian Racing Stories

by Jim Haynes

  South Australian Clare Lindop became the first female jockey to ride in a Melbourne Cup in 2003. At 24 years of age, she finished unplaced on Debben. She won the Adelaide jockeys premiership in the 2004–05 racing season. Tracy and Kathy O’Hara created history by being the first sisters to ride in the same event in Sydney in December 2004.

  It also would be wrong to recount this history without paying tribute to those who have lost their lives in race falls. The Queensland women I recall are Iris Neilsen, who died at Lismore track in 1988; Leanne Crook lost her life at Doomben in 1992; Heidi McNeish was killed in 1996; and Australia’s first female Aboriginal jockey, Leigh Ann Goodwin—a mother—had her life support removed after a fall at Roma track in 1998. Other women such as Paula Lane have lost their lives as a result of trackwork falls.

  I never met or spoke to any of those fallen female jockeys, but on the day before Leigh Ann Goodwin’s funeral in Toowoomba, Radio TAB host Michael Maxworthy played the most beautiful tribute to her. He interviewed her mother about removing the life support and replayed her victory on her father’s horse Getelion, which she rode to victory in Brisbane, at long odds, not long before her passing.

  I taped that interview and carry it with me in the car everywhere I go throughout Queensland. Alone, on a remote road, I’ll often listen to that tape; it helps me understand the brevity of life and the danger that jockeys live with every day in the game we all love. That tape is the reason you will only read positive stories about jockeys on my website—and many profiles on female riders. It’s easy to condemn jockeys for bad rides and forget the safety element that is the main concern. We can all replace the twenty dollars that we lose when a runner gets ‘slaughtered’; no one held a gun to our head and made us back it, anyway. But no amount of money can replace a lost life.

  Female jockeys have certainly come a long way since a girl called Pam O’Neill backed herself all those years ago. During an interview at a ‘legends’ race at Melbourne Cup time a couple of years ago, Pam said, ‘I think you are put on this earth to do something and my job was to get the rule changed so that women could ride against the men. And it was a very hard struggle. I remember when I was about eighteen I’d lead the horses up to the gate at Eagle Farm and hand them over to a male and I think that’s what got me keen from an early age. I was a pony club rider and it just eventuated from there.’

  Today the girls have earned respect. Out on the racetrack, they ask for no quarter—nor should they. They just wanted equality and they finally have that. In the main, the sniggering has stopped. But every time a female jockey dons the silks to ride in a race, she should remember the struggle of an eighteen-year-old kid called Pam O’Neill, who was stopped at the Eagle Farm gates and had to hand over her horse each day to a male.

  Many men in racing officialdom should hang their heads in shame at the treatment Pam copped in those early days. If you ask me, they ought to build a statue to her—she should be in the Hall of Fame. If a bloke achieved what she did, they probably would have had the statue erected by now! May her memory live on every time a female rider flashes past the post to victory somewhere around Australia.

  Phil wrote this article in 2005. In 2010 Pam O’Neill was inducted into the Racing Queensland Hall of Fame. Phil’s informative website is .

  THE BEST TRAINER IN THE WORLD

  BRUCE MONTGOMERIE

  Australia almost lost legendary Melbourne Cup trainer Bart Cummings before he ever trained a horse. When he was 11, in 1939, Bart almost drowned while swimming off the jetty at Adelaide’s famous Glenelg Beach.

  He was going under for the third time when he was rescued by his 12-year-old schoolmate, Brendan O’Grady, the son of a local barber.

  Brendan received a commendation from the Royal Humane Society of Australasia for his heroic action. If it hadn’t been for his alertness and bravery, history would have been robbed of an iconic Aussie character—and arguably the greatest racehorse trainer this country has ever produced.

  James Bartholomew Cummings became known to us all as ‘Bart’ because he shared his father’s first name and the family used his middle name for convenience.

  Bart’s ‘hands-on’ involvement with the Melbourne Cup began when he was the strapper of 1950 winner Comic Court, trained by his father James. But the story begins long before that.

  Bart Cummings came from hardy stock. His grandfather, Thomas Cummins, was a ploughman by profession. Born in 1828, Thomas migrated from Ireland to South Australia on the sailing ship Empanadas and arrived on Christmas Day 1853.

  Thomas Cummins changed his surname to ‘Cummings’ on arrival and settled in the desolate South Australian hamlet of Eurelia, 280 kilometres north of Adelaide. At least he was now ploughing his own land, although it was rather barren land much of the time.

  Bart’s father, Jim, was one of six sons Thomas and his wife brought up on the drought-stricken pastoral land in the north of South Australia.

  Following two bad years, which included a cyclone, dust storms and thunderstorms, young Jim had had enough of Eurelia and, leaving his parents’ farm behind, he braved the unforgiving heat and trekked to Alice Springs to work for his bachelor uncle, James, who needed help running his large station, Granite Downs, at Ellery Creek.

  Jim got precious little in return for all the hard work on his uncle’s property, but he took to handling and riding horses naturally and was quick to make his name as a rider. Jim also worked as a relief driver on the famous Birdsville mail coach, driving the section between Bloods Creek and Alice Springs.

  Jim’s first major victory as a jockey came when he won the 1898 Alice Springs Cup on an aged mare named Myrtle, owned and trained by his uncle.

  Fed up with conditions on his uncle’s property, Jim took up his uncle’s offer to take on Myrtle if he won the race. He took Myrtle, a gelding called Radamantos and an old stock horse, and headed south on the long and arduous 1720-kilometre ride back to Adelaide.

  This was a truly amazing feat on its own, but two weeks after arriving at Jamestown he had Myrtle fit enough to win the local cup. It was the first official success for Jim Cummings as a trainer—and the beginning of the Cummings training dynasty.

  Settling in Glenelg, Jim went on to set a record by training the winners of every classic race in South Australia and training winners in every state except Queensland.

  By the time Bart Cummings was born on 4 November 1927 his father was established as South Australia’s top trainer. Young Bart worked around the stables and had various jobs away from home while his father allowed him to find his own feet and make his own decisions about life.

  As a child Bart fancied himself as a jockey and used to practise his riding skills on Cushla, a brilliant galloper who won nine races for Jim Cummings. She was a docile mare and helped teach the nine-year-old Bart Cummings to ride.

  Bart was allergy-prone from childhood, and suffered from asthma all his life. When he was 16 an Adelaide specialist diagnosed him as being allergic to horses and chaff. The doctor’s advice to stay away from both was advice Bart never heeded.

  By 1947, at age 19, he was a registered strapper with the South Australian Jockey Club and worked for his father for £2 a week and his keep.

  Jim’s best racehorse, Comic Court, was to steer Bart Cummings on the path to becoming a trainer. Bart was Comic Court’s usual strapper at race meetings and he often rode him at trackwork.

  Comic Court had failed in his first two attempts in the Melbourne Cup, finishing fourth as a three-year-old in the 1948 Melbourne Cup and 20th as 7 to 4 second favourite in 1949.

  Experts then considered Comic Court suspect at 2 miles, although he was bred to stay the distance, by Powerscourt out of Witty Maid, who was a granddaughter of Comedy King. He had multiple St Simon bloodlines on both sides of his pedigree, and the experts were proved wrong when Jim Cummings produced the five-year-old to win the 1950 Melbourne Cup.

  Jim had owned Comic Court’s sire and dam, Powerscourt and Wit
ty Maid. However, when racing was banned in South Australia during the war, Jim Cummings took up temporary residence in Victoria and sold both of them to the Bowyer brothers, who bred four classic winning horses from them.

  Comic Court was foaled in 1945 and given to Jim to train.

  The 22-year-old Bart was the strapper for Comic Court’s Melbourne Cup win and, as he led the horse back to the winner’s stall, he daydreamed for the first time about training his own Melbourne Cup winner.

  About this time Jim Cummings was spending more time in Melbourne than Adelaide, and young Bart was often left in charge of his father’s home stables. Such responsibility was perfect grooming for the future champion trainer.

  Still, Bart Cummings took no steps towards becoming a trainer until a decision by the South Australian Jockey Club forced him to take out a training licence. When his father went to Ireland for six months and wanted to leave Bart in charge of his team, the SAJC told Bart he would have to take out a training licence.

  Bart took up training permanently in May 1953. He was given the bottom set of stables at his father’s Glenelg complex and a couple of horses, one of which was the Port Adelaide Cup winner, Welloch.

  Bart’s first city winner was Wells, which won the SAJC Devon Transition Handicap (6 furlongs) at Morphettville on 12 February 1955. Three years later Stormy Passage gave Bart his first feature win in the city by taking out the 1958 South Australian Derby at Morphettville.

  Bart’s first weight-for-age winner came in the VATC Underwood Stakes (10 furlongs) at Caulfield when the unfancied Trellios beat the favourite, Lord, by half a length.

  ‘J.B.’ did it tough in his early days as a trainer and struggled to make a living for himself and his family. His perseverance, patience and uncanny knack of ‘knowing good horses when he saw them’ eventually made him a legend.

  His first Melbourne Cup runner was Asian Court, who finished twelfth in 1958 at long odds. Success came with a blaze of glory in 1965, when one of Bart’s four runners, Light Fingers, narrowly defeated another of his entries, Ziema. It was his fourth attempt at the Cup.

  As early as 1962 one newspaper had stated, ‘Not only is Cummings the man of the moment but also at least the racing man of the decade.’

  His success was such, according to the report, ‘as no other Australian horse trainer has known’.

  Bart went on to win the next two Melbourne Cups, with Galilee and Light Fingers adding another quinella in the 1966 race and Red Handed winning in 1967. No trainer in history had achieved the feat of training three consecutive Cup winners. His eventual tally as a solo trainer would be a staggering twelve Melbourne Cups.

  Bart set a Commonwealth training stakes-winning record in the 1966–67 season, by winning $358,918.

  At that time Sydney’s Tommy Smith was unsurpassed in Australian racing history as the most successful trainer ever, but Bart Cummings’s record of successes in major races surpassed even that of the great T.J. Smith.

  It was over a century since any trainer had prepared one horse to win the Caulfield, Melbourne and Sydney Cups, as Bart did with with Galilee.

  Bart opened a permanent stable in Melbourne during 1968 with enough space for 60 boxes. Since 1965 he had been making two raids a year on Melbourne’s rich purses, and the new set-up was his first step in his plan to become the first trainer to operate self-contained stables in three capital cities: Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney.

  At the close of the 1974–75 racing season, Bart Cummings had trained the winners of 20 Group 1 races with ten different horses, such as Leilani, Cap d’Antibes, Think Big, Leica Show and Lord Dudley winning in five different states. The races won include the Australian, Brisbane, Caulfield and Melbourne Cups, the Goodwood, Newmarket and Toorak Handicaps, WATC and QLD Derbies, the VRC Oaks, and Flight and Mackinnon Stakes. This is still a record for a trainer in any one season.

  In 1975, Bart finally achieved his dream when he set up ‘Leilani Lodge’, at Randwick in Sydney.

  In the late 1980s, Bart suffered a serious setback when he spent millions buying yearlings. Like many others he was hit hard in the recession of the early 1990s. Much of the money spent buying horses to syndicate was connected to a perfectly legal tax minimisation scheme and Bart was left holding the debt. His long-term friend Rex Inglis, through whom most of the yearlings had been purchased, helped Bart out with handling the debt and the situation and through goodwill, and hard work, the great trainer avoided bankruptcy and continued training until the debt was cleared.

  Bart was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1982 for his services to the racing industry. In May 2008 Racing NSW announced a new horseracing award to be known as The Bart Cummings Medal to be awarded for ‘consistent, outstanding performances amongst jockeys and trainers’ at New South Wales metropolitan race meetings through the racing season.

  In recent times he was by far the most successful trainer at Group 1 level with 266 wins. Gai Waterhouse has 132 and Lee Freedman currently has 124. The only record better than Bart’s currently is held by the late Tommy Smith, with 282. If we add Bart’s two Group 1 wins while training in partnership with his grandson James, the tally is 268.

  Bart was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1991, was an inaugural inductee into the Australian Racing Hall of Fame and has since been elevated to the status of Legend—and the only other Legend is Phar Lap.

  Bart had his face placed on a postage stamp in 2007 and shared the Weekend Australian’s 2008 ‘Australian of the Year’ Honour with the 99-year-old Dame Elisabeth Murdoch. He was the only active racing trainer to be given life membership by the Victorian Racing Club.

  From 2012 till his death in 2015, Bart trained in partnership with his grandson James, the eldest son of Bart’s eldest son Anthony, a successful Sydney trainer himself who set up his own stables in the early 1990s after working with his famous dad for many years. Continuing the family tradition, Anthony has trained eighteen Group 1 winners since setting up his own stable.

  Italian-born Luca Cumani, one of Britain’s leading trainers, and the man whose horse, Bauer, was nosed out by Bart’s horse Viewed in the Cup of 2009, paid his rival the ultimate compliment after the race: ‘His record is amazing because I know how hard it is to win a Melbourne Cup. He is a special man . . . He is the greatest trainer in the world.’

  Not bad for a bloke who was allergic to horses.

  Bart Cummings died peacefully, surrounded by his family, on 30 August 2105. He was given a state funeral at Sydney’s St Mary’s Cathedral.

  INTRODUCTION—GALLANT HORSEMEN AND BRAVE STEEDS

  Jumps racing has always been more popular in the cooler southern states of Australia. The winter weather there is more reminiscent of the cold climate in Britain, where riding over jumps is a winter activity.

  The first Australian steeplechase was run in Sydney in 1832. It was conducted over almost 7 miles, from the Botany Road Bridge, adjacent to the ‘old Randwick’ track, to South Head Road via Coogee. I assume spectators had a choice of watching either the start or the finish, or riding along to observe.

  Originally steeplechases were cross-country events and hurdles were conducted on normal racetracks. Tasmania’s first hurdle race was held at Oatlands in 1833 and Victoria’s first jumping race, a hurdle event at Batman’s Hill, where Spencer Street Station now stands, occurred in 1839.

  By 1841 Victoria’s first steeplechase had been conducted near Flemington racecourse and, by the 1850s, jumps racing was well established in all the colonies.

  Tasmania and Victoria led the way in the development of jumping as a sport. Provincial cities such as Warrnambool, Coleraine and Ballarat developed winter carnivals during the nineteenth century and, on 1 January 1866, the VRC Grand National Steeplechase over 3 miles was run for the first time on a program that featured the Derby and the Intercolonial Champion Stakes over 3 miles.

  In 1868 the poet Adam Lindsay Gordon rode three steeplechase winners in one day at Flemington.

  In So
uth Australia hurdle racing developed in the 1840s and Oakbank’s first race meeting was held in 1877.

  The heyday of jumps racing in Australia was probably the latter half of the nineteenth century. All-comers were able to compete back then and, as late as 1927, an amateur rider, Mr J. Grice, was able to win the Grand National Steeple.

  While enthusiasm for the sport continued to grow in the south, with new races being added to the calendar, like the A.V. Hiskens Steeple in 1936, other states were responding to changing public sentiment.

  Reaction against the injuries and huge weights being carried—the entire field fell in the 1934 Grand Annual and, in 1935, Greensea won a Rosehill Hurdle carrying 13 st 12 lb (88 kg)—eventually led to steeplechasing, then hurdling, being phased out in New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia.

  Perth’s last hurdle was run in 1941, and a horse named Anpapejo went down in history as the winner of the last hurdle race at Randwick, in 1942.

  In recent times the new-style brush jumps, designed to improve safety for horses and riders, and innovations such as the Australian jockeys versus Irish jockeys series, have led to a revival of sorts. Annual hurdle races were even run again in Sydney for a few years from 1986.

  You either love jumps racing or you don’t, there’s no in-between. I think there are few sports as exciting and exhilarating. I hope that we can persist in tolerating regional differences in this country so that great events like those at Ballarat, Oakbank and Warrnambool will continue to challenge horses and riders and thrill spectators for many years to come.

  HERE’S LUCK–A TOAST

  A.B. ‘BANJO’ PATERSON

  It chanced one day I watched a steeplechase,

  And one horse singled out and led them all

  Across the fences at a rattling pace,