Earlier I'd stood with Cummings in one of the three portable shelters on stilts from which trainers, stopwatches in hand, peer down at their horses as they pant and puff their way through the half-light of a Flemington morning.

Cummings uses the middle hut, and has done so for as long as anyone can remember. Four or five younger trainers also use the glass-walled shelter and the talk is the free-flowing banter of a footy club changing room. But Cummings is happy to stay on the sidelines, apart but not aloof, occasionally interjecting with a laconic remark.

This time it's a story in a sports section that draws him in.

"Jeez, that Aidan O'Brien gave you some rap in the paper," says one trainer before reading the quotes from the Irish horseman: "'Bart Cummings is an unbelievably special man and everything he says I listen to. I wouldn't contradict or say anything against what he said'."

"Now Reg," Cummings says, turning to his long-time offsider in Melbourne, Reg Fleming, "that Aidan O'Brien speaks a lot of sense and I think you should pay attention to what he says."

Cue much laughter.

In the past week the 39-year-old O'Brien, who trains Cup favourite Septimus, has been the centre of attention, with some calling him possibly the best trainer ever.

A win in the Cup would propel O'Brien towards a new world record of 26 group 1 wins in a season.

As it happens, Cummings is on the brink of his own astounding record: he has trained the winners of an astonishing 249 group 1 races - the blue-ribbon events of the turf. If Cummings feels even the slightest threat from the young pretender to his crown, he's not showing it.

"He's clearly a good trainer and his horse could be the one to beat," he says of O'Brien and Septimus.

Cummings, as ever, is keeping his cool. There are no certainties on a racetrack except this: if Viewed or Moatize, his likely runners in the Cup, hit the front nearing the line, it's odds-on that the unflappable veteran won't be caught jumping up and down.

"There's no good getting too excited about anything … what will be, will be," he says.

"I've never understood people who wave their arms around and jump up and down. If you've done your job right and prepared the horses as well as you can there's no more you can do, except hope for a little luck."

James Bartholomew Cummings's base in Melbourne is Saintly Place, a terrace house in the shadows of Flemington racecourse which has stables for 30 horses out the back. He has owned it since 1968 but did not name it until 1989, after the retirement of the chestnut gelding he bred and trained to win the Cox Plate and Melbourne Cup double.

It's a place from which he has sent out many winners. And when he's in Melbourne he's still there daily, often before five in the morning.

"The alarm goes off at around 4.30 or so and I usually head to the stables then, and if everything's OK, I head to the track," he says.

"The first seven years are the toughest - after that you hit a routine."

One he has maintained since 1953.

Saintly Place staff are happy to show off their horses to visitors. Rugs off, the thoroughbreds gleam like sports cars. Most, however, cost much more than a fancy car.

Some trainers leave horses looking overworked and weary, but not Cummings. He might be hard on interviewers but he is famously kind to horses, which stand out even in the highest quality of fields.

He credits his staff with a lot.

"The horses and the strappers are best friends," he says. "Spend any time in the yard and you see the strappers are in love with their horses. There's almost a competition running between them as to who can look after their horses the best, and that's great because you need that level of care."

He says he never pushes horses to do anything before they are ready.

He was among the first to treat thoroughbreds for such complaints as stomach ulcers and he has this maxim: "If a horse isn't performing well, there's usually something's wrong, even if it's not obvious straight away."

It's a view backed up by his former assistant Nigel Blackiston, who trains local Cup fancy Littorio.

"Bart's very patient and never forces a horse to do something it's not ready for," Blackiston says.

But what really keeps Cummings at the top of his profession in his ninth decade is an inquiring mind.

"There are people who can tell you which horses filled the first three in the Cup for the past 20 years," he says as we crawl through rush-hour traffic. "They can probably tell you the colours as well - that's hopeless.

"I don't want to know something in the past, I want information I can use. Who's going to be the next great stallion, what's going to win the next Cup?

"You have to ask questions because there are always people who know something you don't. If you start to think you know it all, that's the moment when you hit real trouble."