Horse racing / The Early Crow / 10 November 2009 / Leave a comment Bet Now

With the Spring Carnival's Group One racing over, many pundits are hailing trainer Mark Kavanagh and jockey Corey Brown as the duo that made the Spring. But the experts are missing the point. There can only be one King of the Spring and it was Bart Cummings first, daylight second.

The Bart Cummings show has now officially rolled out of Melbourne, but the Cups King leaves knowing that his affable wit and abrupt one-liners have been franked where it counts: on the racetrack. In the past four weeks, Cummings has re-written his own record books by producing perhaps the most remarkable training performance of all time.

Over four weeks, Cummings achieved an extraordinary succession of four Group One wins, each coming with a different horse. Allez Wonder took out the Toorak Handicap, Viewed trounced them in the Caulfield Cup, So You Think gave the best WFA horses a galloping lesson in the Cox Plate and Faint Perfume claimed the VRC Oaks.

Bart Cummings is the greatest horse trainer Australia has seen. And it would be a brave or foolhardy person to suggest there's been a better trainer in the world. Many of us thought his glory days were behind him, but it pays to remember that in recent years Cummings had brought a team to Melbourne predominantly made up of plodders.

The master trainer has always said that the secret to successful training is finding good horses. This year, he brought a team down from Randwick that was arguably the best he'd ever assembled.

So You Think is a potential superstar. He's achieved something previously considered impossible by winning the Cox Plate as a raw three-year-old in only his sixth race start. His second placing in the Emirates Stakes on the Flemington carnival's final day was a cracking effort for an unseasoned racehorse finishing off a Cox Plate campaign.

Viewed's Caulfield Cup win vindicated what was, in many ways, a surprising win in the Melbourne Cup of 2008. Many punters had written him off as another Rogan Josh: a one-hit wonder that had fluked winning the big one in an ordinary year. But the big horse towelled them up at Caulfield, putting to rest any doubts about him being the real deal.

Bart Cummings doesn't see the training of racehorses as rocket science. While so many others talk of the intricacies of the race - how a track bias or penetrometer reading had cost their horse a victory - Cummings just tells it how it is. He told the crowd at Moonee Valley's Cox Plate breakfast that So You Think had ten lengths improvement on his run in the Caulfield Guineas. After the horse won the Cox Plate, he told the assembled media that he ran it because he thought it was good enough to win. That was despite advice from everyone he'd spoken to not to run the horse. And that included his own staff. Bart had a hunch and he went with it.

Bart laughs at trainers who yield to the indulgences of owners. He trains for people who let him get on with the business of deciding when and where to run a horse. He doesn't like people meddling in his job. For his luckiest owner, the Malaysian property developer Dato Tan Chin Nam, it's proven a lucrative philosophy. Let the master go about his work on his own. Enjoy the arm chair ride as your horses claim the Caulfield Cup, Cox Plate, Wakeful Stakes and the VRC Oaks.

In many ways, Bart Cummings is the Melbourne Cup Carnival. It wasn't the same before him and it most certainly won't be after him. Forget about Mark Kavanagh and Corey Brown. This year the Spring Carnival's biggest attraction has dominated on the track in the same manner as he always has off the track.