James Cummings uses golf game as catalyst for Champagne Stakes win with Prized Icon

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Golf is one of sport's great levellers, even if you ask the world's best. Those with seemingly superhuman powers one moment are reduced to withering wrecks the next.

In racing parlance, Jordan Spieth was a couple of strides from the finishing post and dumped the jockey in last week's US Masters.

On a winner: Prized Icon has continued Anthony Cummings' great run. Photo: bradleyphotos.com.au

It is debatable if James Cummings' golf game was enduring the same jelly legs as the man who had one arm in the green jacket a few hours earlier.

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It was only midway through his Monday round that Cummings put away the safety-first rescue he was clutching and gripped the driver to unload off the tee.

Prized Icon, his Fernhill Handicap winner from 48 hours earlier, would be taking on the Champagne Stakes later in the week at Randwick.

So how did Cummings, a golf fanatic who has been known to watch swing tutorials in between trackwork, hit them then?

"I warmed up late when I found out I had a group 1 runner," Cummings joked after Prized Icon raced away with the $500,000 race, the young trainer's first in his own name after the death of his grandfather Bart late last year.

"He was on the float and he would have been half-way to Bells Line Of Road before I told them to turn back because the [nominations] looked too skinny for this race."

Cummings' wife Monica, whose family-owned Gooree Stud now have a ready-made stallion, quipped "golf is good for many things". Even race programming, as it turns out.

No one has been more astute in their planning than Cummings this carnival. Horses just below the cream have targeted the second-tier races - and inevitably won.

Prized Icon? No one would have thought him a group 1 winner come mid-April after holding off Chimboraa with Divine Prophet in third. Maybe no one bar the trainer himself.

"He was one of our very interesting horses," Cummings said. "Like I said last week, we don't nominate that many for the Golden Slipper.

"We're up against stables that are nominating 120 a year and we were lucky to get to 20. We identified him as a very interesting customer all along and we trained him for that Breeders' Plate. We were tough on him and he showed how much he loved it.

"He's a prize fighter and more than an icon. He's fought every fight - he's bumped into Capitalist, he's bumped into Telperion. It's a great effort from him."

And also from Glyn Schofield. The beneficiary of Cummings' late push to the Champagne Stakes with the colt's usual rider Hugh Bowman committed to eventual runner-up Chimboraa, not many have stuck by Schofield in recent months as stewards closed the net on sales to Hong Kong he helped facilitate without seeking approval.

Yet bar Bowman, no one has ridden more group 1 winners this season.

"[Cummings] has been about the only one that has supported me during the difficult times of late and I'm so happy for him as his first group 1 winner on his own," Schofield said.

"He was toying whether to run the horse and fortunately he had a few people giving him the right advice as well. I think in the back of his mind he knew he wanted to run.

"Then there was the unfortunate scratching [of favourite Yankee Rose on race eve], but who's to say she would have beaten this fella today because he was dominant."

Chimboraa's trainer David Payne was far from despondent about his colt's second, which makes it four placings from six starts for the  maiden.

"He is not really a two-year-old and has just run second in a group 1," Payne said. "That was super, he can put him away and start looking at Guineas and Derby races in the spring."

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