It seemed a match made in heaven: the good-looking grandson of Melbourne Cup king Bart Cummings, boasting a cleanskin image and now wearing the famous royal blue colours known all around the world.
Before he was even out of his 20s, James Cummings had one of the most coveted roles in international horse racing – the Australian head trainer for Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s Godolphin empire.
Success would naturally follow. It had to follow. And largely, it has.
But amid a slumping number of runners in Australia and a steady increase in the amount of horses Godolphin is selling through online platforms, Cummings and the powerhouse operation is facing its most turbulent time in the southern hemisphere.
So, what exactly is the future of Godolphin in Australia? And how much are they scaling back their Australian business?
For starters, the head trainer role is pertinent.
Idol Horse has spoken to multiple sources for this story, who all suggested Cummings is yet to sign a contract to remain as Godolphin Australia’s No. 1 conditioner beyond this season.
Given his stable is in the middle of the lucrative autumn carnivals in both Sydney and Melbourne, there is a need for urgency when it comes to the negotiation.
Sources close to the Godolphin operation insist Cummings wants to remain in the royal blue, and the prospect of training progeny from the likes of Australian Horse of the Year Anamoe and star sprinter Bivouac holds significant appeal.
But there will be others circling.
He would be a perfect fit for the Hong Kong Jockey Club’s push to regenerate their training roster, much in the way they aggressively targeted David Eustace and prised him out of a successful training partnership with Ciaron Maher.
There’s also the chance of returning as a public trainer in his own right, much in the way he did after the death of Bart in 2015.
But does Godolphin even want to persist with the model of a head trainer in Australia, perhaps preferring to spread their horses around different yards?
Most notably, Anthony and Sam Freedman have done well with limited opportunities from Godolphin horses, and the Australian company’s managing director Andy Makiv, who was appointed after an exhaustive wait following Vin Cox’s defection to Yulong, had divvied up the late owner Colin McKenna’s horses among several trainers in a previous role.
Even with jockeys, Godolphin has moved away from tying riders to retainers, a la James McDonald, who has now emerged as one of the world’s best and primarily rides for Australia’s champion Group 1 trainer Chris Waller, while also jumping on Godolphin’s topliners.
This week, speculation that Chinese billionaire Zhang Yuesheng’s Yulong operation was on the verge of buying out Godolphin in Australia went into overdrive.
There’s a common link between the two giants: Cox was Godolphin’s Australian boss until late in 2023 before leaving to head up Yulong.
But according to Cox, there’s little substance to the rampant rumour.
“It’s been around for months and I’d assume if Mr Zhang wanted to go down that path, I would know about it,” Cox said. “There’s no substance to it.”
Yet the numbers are stark: at the stable’s current rate Cummings is due to have just 650 runners at the end of the Australian racing season on July 31, almost half of what he had in the early days of his stint in Godolphin blue in 2018–19 (1276 runners).
Across the summer months he had 121 starters, down from 181 starters during the 2023–24 summer and less than half the 253 runners from December 2020 to February 2021.
Even compared to recent years, it’s still a significant decrease on the number of starters he had in 2022–23 (961) and 2023-24 (804). The Australian operation is clearly streamlining.
But numbers only paint part of the picture.
While the likes of Anamoe, In Secret and Broadsiding have led Cummings’ charge, resulting in his best Group 1 haul two seasons ago (11), the well has dried up.
Before Saturday’s Randwick Guineas where Broadsiding was a raging-hot favourite, the only Australian Group 1 win Godolphin has had in more than seven months this season was the colt’s electric Golden Rose success last September.
Worryingly, the conveyor belt of subsequent Group 1 winners sent to clean up Australia’s weight-for-age ranks from Europe – think Hartnell, Contributer, Avilius and Cascadian – is no longer.
It’s hard to think of a top class Group 1 star transferred within the Godolphin machine to Australia since Cascadian – and he arrived in 2019.
One such advocate for Godolphin’s Australian operation was John Ferguson, who regularly travelled Down Under.
He’s long left the international goliath – resigning as chief executive in 2017 after a falling out with trainer Saeed Bin Suroor – but he had a knack of navigating the tricky politics of dealing with Godolphin’s trainers in both hemispheres, and which horses would be moved where.
It’s little coincidence that once he left Godolphin, the constant trickle of European weight-for-age horses bound for Australia has stopped, and so did their frequency competing in the country’s thin weight-for-age ranks after Winx’s retirement.
It also hasn’t helped that a number of stallions Godolphin had pinned their hopes on have struggled: Sepoy, Impending, Astern, Microphone. Epaulette was sold to Turkey; his half-brother Helmet sired the only two-time Dubai World Cup winner Thunder Snow before being shifted to Italy. Added to that, Lonhro has died and Exceed And Excel has been retired.
When the vast majority of their stock comes from in-house breeding programs – they’ve bought only one filly in the past two years at major Australian sales – the success of their bloodlines is crucial to on-track performance.
Bivouac is showing promise as a first-season sire, while Blue Point’s progeny has established him as one of the most promising stallions with just his second-year crop on the track. They need those stallions to be the backbone of their future.
Sheikh Mohammed has been arguably the most significant investor in Australian racing for the best part of two decades, employing hundreds of staff, and the scale of his financial commitment is laid bare in Godolphin Australia’s company records.
According to their most recent filings, to the year ending December 31 in 2023, the Australian operation has a A$1.17 billion loan to its parent entity, Godolphin International Limited.
Whether that will ever need to be repaid, partly or in full, will be solely at Sheikh Mohammed’s discretion.
But digging deeper suggests the purse strings were tightening way back in 2023.
The Australian arm was asked to make a near $8 million repayment to Godolphin International during the year when none was offered in 2022.
The sale of livestock raked in more than $41 million for the company in 2023, more than double the previous year ($19.8 million) as local bosses pursued a leaner operation, one which still turned a healthy $33 million profit after tax for the year.
Idol Horse made multiple unsuccessful attempts to contact Godolphin executives for this story.
But it’s hard to dismiss the theory that one of the most important cogs in the Australian breeding and racing world is scaling back.
The only question is: how much? ∎
