When he died in Sydney in the early hours of yesterday morning, aged 87, the record stood at 12 Melbourne Cups, 34 Derbys, 24 Oaks, seven Caulfield Cups, four Golden Slippers and five Cox Plates.
If you say 12 Melbourne Cups quickly and it doesn't ring loud bells for you, consider this: one of the richest men on the planet, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, owner and ruler and everything else that is Dubai, has for 15 or 16 years been trying to win his first Melbourne Cup from a team of 1000 horses around the world and can't.
Bart won 12 of them with around one tenth of the horses. The next biggest haul behind him is five Cups.
For the record: Light Fingers (1965), Galilee (1966), Red Handed (1967), Think Big (1974 and 1975), Gold and Black (1977), Hyperno (1979), Kingston Rule (1990), Let's Elope (1991), Saintly (1996), Rogan Josh (1999) and Viewed (2008).
He had been hoping to take out another Melbourne Cup this year with the four-time Cup runner Precedence.
A year or so back they asked about 10 leading trainers for their most important element of training big race winners and received a variety of answers from "proper breeding" to "paying attention to detail".
When they got to Bart last, he said: "Happiness. A horse has to be happy."
Some politely scoffed, but that was one of the Cummings' secrets - getting inside a horse's head. The fact he was from Irish stock had him inside the equine brain closer than most from the start.
His other secret was patience. When he trained Saintly to win the Melbourne Cup in 1996 it was a stroke of genius.
The raw material had been a lanky, almost weak horse in the making and Bart waited. Then he waited some more.
When he finally did put the pedal to the metal it was two weeks out from the Melbourne Cup and Bart's approach did a complete back flip - he worked Saintly harder than any horse previously.
Darren Beadman, as good a jockey as this world has known, admitted in his biography he felt Bart might have got this one wrong.
Saintly was working hard out and Beadman was concerned.
"I was sure Bart was going to bottom him out, but each morning I rode him he got stronger. When I worked him on the Monday before the Cup, Saintly was a powder keg waiting to explode."
Sheer genius.
Saintly won the Cup and could still have won had he run the last 200m backwards.
Later, Cummings would say he rated Saintly alongside the horse he always thought of as his best, the 1966 Cup winner Galilee.
But Saintly broke down. "We never saw the best of him," said Cummings, with that air of acceptance horse trainers either develop, or wish they could develop.
His last runner, Sultry Feeling, won at Rosehill Gardens on Saturday.
Perhaps his greatest accolade is that throughout Australia he was known simply as Bart. Bart stood for Melbourne Cups, big race winners and sublime horsemanship.
In 1991, he was inducted into the Sport Of Australia Hall Of Fame.
For the past 12 months there had been a steady physical decline and Cummings died peacefully early yesterday morning surrounded by his son Anthony, grandson and training partner James and his wife of 61 years Valmae.
He will also be remembered for his wit. Some of the Bart one-liners will remain with us forever.
It's hackneyed now, but when a Sydney health officer arrived one afternoon at the Cummings Randwick stable, plonked amidst a dense housing area, and said, "Mr Cummings, you've got too many flies", the reply came: "How many am I allowed?"
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree in the Cummings family.
When Anthony Cummings once won a big race, he said: "Dad taught me everything I know, unfortunately he didn't teach me everything he knows."
Genius can't be taught.
Hard act to follow
•Bart Cummings trained 12 Melbourne Cup winners in his illustrious career.
•His first Cup winner was the New Zealand-bred Light Fingers in 1966.
•As well as being a master horseman he was renowned for his dry sense of humour.
