RACING Cummings Already In N.Z. For Sales

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31881, 8 January 1969, Page 4

RACING Cummings Already In N.Z. For Sales

The Adelaide trainer, J. B. Cummings, who has spent $326,000. on yearlings on his last four visits to New Zealand, is one of the first arrivals for the 1969 National Yearling Sales, which will begin next week.

Cummings won three Melbourne Cups with Waikato - bred horses and, not surprisingly, he has wasted no time moving into Waikato to inspect products of the top studs there before they are moved to Trentham.

He inspected the Trelawney and Pirongia Stud drafts yesterday, and at the week-end he will attend the parade of

yearlings from the Te Parse Stud draft

Galilee, the greatest horse ever to race for the Cummings stable, was bred at Trelawney. Red Handed, the 1967 Melbourne Cup winner, was bred at Pirongia Stud and sired by Le Filou, which also sired Light Fingers. Light Fingers was bred by Mr V. F. Dawson but was leased for her racing career by Mr W. J. Broderick, and won the 1965 Melbourne Cup in the colours of that Melbourne racing administrator and regular sales visitor. Cummings does his “home work” long before the sales begin.

Year Ahead

He is a year ahead of many would-be buyers at the sales because on his stud visits year after year he usually finds time to inspect the foals as well as the yearlings. The man who keeps a card index system for complete training, feeding and racing records of horses in his three stables also does some exhaustive book work on the New Zealand sales catalogues. He goes far beyond the family records printed in the sales catalogues in his “home work” on the yearlings he is attracted to on breeding. At the studs or in the boxes at Trentham before the sales he then examines the young-

sters closely for conformation and type. Last year Cummings spent $120,650 in securing 17 New Zealand-bred yearlings for his clients, some of whom are New Zealanders. He had planned to make other purchases as well, but had to bow out on several

occasions in the face of spectacular bidding by members of the millionaire Foyster family from New South Wales. The Foysters spent over $250,000 a year ago. Since then they have engaged Cummings to train Gooree King for them.