Anthony Cummings drove down High Street a while ago and couldn’t help thinking about what was missing from Leilani Lodge. The old fig tree was there and the memories came flooding back, but the thing absent was what has kept his family there for 50 years: the horses.
“For the first time ever during a Randwick carnival, the stable is empty,” Cummings tells Idol Horse. “In what way does it improve anything at Randwick for the family not to be there?”
It’s not a stretch to say the yard at Royal Randwick has been the most famous stables in modern Australian racing history.
Anthony’s father, the late Bart Cummings, prepared umpteen Melbourne Cup winners there; Anthony’s son James, now the head trainer for Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s Australian arm of the Godolphin operation, started his career there; and Anthony and his other son, Edward, have teamed up on various occasions from the base.
Yet for now, Leilani Lodge is empty – and no one is quite sure who will take over.
The Australian Turf Club will undertake a process for the next trainer to be housed there, and Edward wants to be the leading candidate, having only just been returned as a licensed trainer himself. He will need his credentials to be upgraded to a metropolitan trainer, and knows other gargantuan stables are circling Leilani Lodge.
“I’m very supportive of Edward and he runs a good show, he runs a good stable and he’s had great results out of Hawkesbury, and he helped us running the business and taking some of the pressure off,” Anthony says.
“We had some success at Leilani Lodge when he was there running it through his business.
“He’s entitled to be there, both through ability and the family connection as well.”
But sentiment only goes so far in horse racing.
A month on from sensationally having his licence stripped and dropping his appeal, Anthony is enjoying a quieter life away from the spotlight. It’s not easy when a downfall creates regular tabloid fodder, especially when so many other trainers go through similar battles privately. But he is a Cummings, and his family is racing royalty.
Anthony says it’s nice being “Joe Citizen” for once. But what’s hard to ignore is how quickly the end of his training operation came, trying to stave off financial difficulties which had his business placed into liquidation last year owing more than A$2 million.
Edward stepped in to help, giving up his own licence and using his Myrtle House business to basically run his father’s operation. He had a freeze put on any prizemoney won by his horses until all staff were paid their entitlements, a situation Anthony said was resolved.
But he was still deemed not a “fit and proper” person to hold a training licence and was booted from Leilani Lodge, forced to find new homes for his horses.
He was ready to fight for his licence through an appeals process, but dropped it in the hope it would help Edward take over the stable.
“I did that on the Monday and we’d been told they were going to have a licensing subcommittee meeting that morning, he would have his licence that day and then kick on during the carnival,” Anthony says. “(But) the hoops he had to jump through to get his licence back were (significant).
“At the end of the day, there was no industry debt. It was minimal in any case. It was all paid in the normal course.”
It’s hard to think of the Sydney scene without the affable Anthony Cummings, striding to the Royal Randwick trainers’ hut at dawn, hours after others had crawled out of bed to crank the trackwork machine into gear. The really early rises were never his go, but his humour will be missed.
At the state funeral for his legendary father, Anthony found the line to best sum up Bart during an emotional eulogy.
“He taught me everything I know, but not everything he knew.”
The congregation momentarily cackled rather than cried.
So, what’s next? Can Anthony possibly make a return to the only game his family has ever known?
He’s off on a holiday to Thailand in June. That’s his priority. And it’s also about the same time his gun Group 1 star El Castello is due to return to training, under the management of another handler.
“I haven’t made up my mind,” he says about a potential comeback, which would need regulatory approval. “I’m enjoying a lack of deadlines in my life at the minute.
“It’s certainly on the cards, but I’d need to have a think about how I would want to structure it with people and everything that comes with that. I’ve still got a few horses running around, and as a trainer you’ve always got your own opinion. It seems to be the make-up of all of us.
“So, frustrations abound.” ∎
