No, not without a winner, but only the odd one and doing it tough. All horse trainers do it tough, even Cummings, who ended up with more than 300 group one victories.
Rae has trained one, Egyptian Raine in the 2003 Railway at Ellerslie, and today is likely to be his second group one winner.
The lot of a horse trainer has never been better put than by the magnificent wordsmith Les Carlyon in his portrait of Bart Cummings titled The Master, in which he quotes the subject with "I was eating the wallpaper of the walls [in the early days in Adelaide]".
"You do everything right and the horse runs a fading seventh. You have to hose him down, float him home, groom him, rug him, feed him - in short exactly as you would the winner of a feature race.
"The next morning you roll out of bed two hours before dawn, take the horse to the track and try to work out why he could only run seventh. This is the everyday side of racing that doesn't get written up in the sporting pages. It is the lot of struggling trainers and always will be.
"You fall out of bed, try to forget you are slowly going broke and resort to gallows humour about the palpability of wallpaper. And all the time the mind is going. Maybe the horse needs blinkers, Maybe he needs freshening up. Maybe he's just naturally so slow he couldn't outrun a fat man down a well. And, while all this is swirling around inside, you keep smiling and cracking jokes with track regulars, as though to say to the world there's nothing else you'd rather do."
Beautifully put. No game in town is more of a leveller - up and down - than horse racing.
When Rae gave his victory speech after Egyptian Raine's Railway win he told the Ellerslie crowd that the previous day he hadn't been able to pay his cellphone bill.
It's that level of honesty that endears you to the battling former jumps jockey that morphed into the trainer of the country's best filly.
Which in itself is an interesting story. Rae was at his satellite Christchurch stable when he received a call that Cambridge's Windsor Park had a filly to lease which he was invited to inspect.
"Haven't got time," he said, hoping that would mask his disinterest. "It was only when I noticed that the filly was out of Finishing School that I sat up and took notice," Rae told the Weekend Herald yesterday. "Finishing School was third to Egyptian Raine in a group-rated 2-year-old race and I rated her.
"I said: 'Oh well, we're only leasing her, send her up to my place and we'll break her in and see what happens'." What happened? Prom Queen won eight of her nine starts with a collective winning margin of 31.2 lengths.
There is a temptation for the trainer of a top horse to say they always knew they had a budding champ. Rae is so honest he says had he inspected Prom Queen at the stud, even with the Finishing School connection, he would have probably turned her down.
"There is nothing of her," he says of the speed machine that has scant regard for the opposition.
"Even when we started working her along she showed nothing. And even now she does nothing on the training track, she flops along like an old handicapper."
It is the essence of a true topliner - they save their speed and energy for when they need it raceday. Almost a sixth sense.
The classic 1600m distance is the bridging gap between sheer speed and staying. Often it can be the most difficult of all distances because at the top level speedsters still ensure pace, but stamina is required late.
Today Prom Queen has to stretch herself out from the furthest she has run, 1400m, to the 1600m on a testing track.
Yes, she can do it, not necessarily because it is her optimum trip, but because she has sheer class. More class than the others and that's a big call because the main danger, Dijon Bleu, has plenty of it.
If it happens don't expect histrionics from Kenny Rae. Like you suspected Cummings knew, Rae is aware that in horse racing today's peacock is tomorrow's feather duster.
The Northlander could win the Prix de L'Arc de Triomph in Paris and when the handshakes were done, desire no more than a pie and a beer with his mates.
Which is why we will cheer him today.
