Agresta was definitely no average Joe for Cups maestro Bart Cummings

Joe Agresta’s passion for racehorses harboured a dream to become a successful jockey who would be chased by the best Melbourne racing stables.

He got his chance, but then reality set in. The dreaded curse of many jockeys – weight – got him and he realised he wasn’t good enough to make it.

Agresta developed a duodenal ulcer through wasting and was warned by a doctor he’d be dead in six months if he kept going.

The horror of his first race ride would still haunt lesser men.

He said it was like being strapped into a dodgem car at the village fair and he didn’t know where he was going when the gates crashed open; his head was spinning and all he could hear were other jockeys yelling and screaming at him. It was a blur.

The dream came to an end for Agresta after just 15 rides on a B-grade licence. Although he had five seconds, he says he would have ridden a winner if he hadn’t “slaughtered” a couple, particularly one at Tatura that is still fresh in his memory even though it was more than four decades ago.

And while he never rode a winner, he was on the backs of more Melbourne Cup winners and champion horses than probably any of the jockeys who did make it.

He proved that while he failed at one pursuit, he was a gun in another crucial area when he reluctantly started as a track rider for the man dubbed the Cups King, Bart Cummings, at Flemington in January, 1980.

After being with the quick-witted Cummings for so long, there were times when the now 72-year-old Agresta thought his boss was a “silly old bastard” because of the workloads he placed on his champion stayers.

When Cummings was proved right, he loved telling Agresta that hopefully he had learned a lesson about preparing horses for the Melbourne Cup.

And along the way the master trainer relied heavily on the opinion of Agresta, who for the past 33 years has also worked for the Moonee Valley City Council building access ramps and other equipment for the aged and disabled.

“People ask me the secret about Bart and the secret is that there is no secret,” Agresta said.

“What he did was there for everyone to see, but no one in the world was game to give the horses the work he did. I’d bet my life on that.

“There were plenty of times I thought he was going to kill a horse with the work, but it just goes the other way.”

Agresta gives a perfect example. Cummings was based in Sydney and would send down the work program for his horses.

He hadn’t seen the champion Kingston Rule work for six weeks and when he lobbed at Flemington during the 1990 spring carnival he was less than impressed with the gelding’s racing condition and quickly told Agresta the horse was too fat and he’d been too easy on him.

“I told him that I don’t care what you think and that he would win the Moonee Valley Cup,” Agresta said.

“I thought, ‘the silly old bastard’, and started walking away and he said ‘don’t walk away, son’, and when I walked back he told me that if he wins the Moonee Valley Cup on Saturday, we’ll improve him 10 lengths for the Melbourne Cup in 10 days.

“I walked away again thinking, ‘you silly old bastard’, and anyway, the horse won the Moonee Valley Cup.

Cummings instructed Agresta to gallop the horse every second day leading into the The Dalgety – a week after his Moonee Valley win.

Kingston Rule ran second but Cummings didn’t let up on him going into the Melbourne Cup which was just three days later and even worked him on the morning of the race.

“I thought he was going to kill the horse but he won the Cup and still holds the record (3:16.3),” he said.

While Agresta described the late master trainer as a freak, he uses the same description for the horse he rates as the best to come out of the stable, So You Think, which controversially went to Irish trainer Aiden O’Brien after finishing third in the 2010 Melbourne Cup.

“People ask me the secret about Bart and the secret is that there is no secret” – Joe Agresta

O’Brien added another five Group 1s to the five So You Think won for Cummings.

A stunning black entire, So You Think had a major breathing problem and still won races despite having only a lung capacity of about 27 per cent, which was significantly increased after surgery.

His trophy cabinet includes two Cox Plates, but Cummings told Agresta the horse couldn’t win the Melbourne Cup because he hadn’t been prepared for the 3200m race.

Cummings’ mantra was that a Melbourne Cup runner had to go around in a mile-and-half contest (2400m) before the big race but So You Think didn’t run over that distance in the lead-up because the Cox Plate was the priority.

“Had he run in a mile-and-a-half (race) he’d have won the Cup,” Cummings later reflected.

“That was my only concern but I couldn’t do anything about it because he had to start in the Cox Plate, and couldn’t go around in a mile-and-a-half before it.”

Agresta has no doubt So You Think would have won the following year’s Cup if Cummings had kept the horse and prepared him for it.

“He would have won anything we set him for him,” Agresta said.

“He could have won a Newmarket Handicap (1200m) because he was so freakish.”

And while Cummings, a winner of 12 Melbourne Cups, was shattered to lose So You Think, the loss also broke Agresta’s heart.

Agresta says that when he starts talking about So You Think his kids tell him to see a psychiatrist.

“They say Dad, get over it,” he said.

But he reckons he never will.