This is a business and the primary function of a trainer is to

“This is a business and the primary function of a trainer is to run it properly,” Meehan says. “The big thing is to increase your quality and, whatever anyone says, the only way to do that is improve your budget.”Quality comes at a price and there are only so many times you buy a pair of shoes that you throw away overnight before you realise you should buy a proper pair for £200 that last for years. It’s all about turnover because the prizemoney is such a disgrace. That’s why you don’t cry when a horse like Romantic Liason goes. As long as we have got horses good enough to sell to Sheikh Mohammed and he wants to buy them then they will go.”This is a common story, even if Brian Meehan’s is not.

When an Irishman comes into racing it is usually as part of a family tree in the sport of sequoia proportions. He is the exception.Meehan is from Limerick, though his was hardly an Angela’s Ashes upbringing as the son of an orthopaedic surgeon. Indeed, he appeared set to embark on the medical profession himself when he left Roscrea, a Cistercian monastery in Tipperary. These days though, as he sits behind his desk with a Silk Cut almost a sixth digit on his hand, he does not appear very Benedictine at all.Post Hannon, he started off with eight horses at Folly House stables in Lambourn, just another worker bee on racing’s great honeycomb. That he has risen from there is confirmation that Meehan has learned another great modern lesson of the turf: that training two-year-olds proficiently is the way to start vaulting up the ladder.The fates have usually been in his corner, as the man himself readily admits, but even outrageous good fortune cannot lift you from single figures to the 110 currently accommodated at Newlands.”All you’ve got to do [to be a trainer] is get up in the morning and watch them canter,” Meehan says.

“Then you sit on the phone and smoke fags all day.”Our success is mainly down to luck Pure fluke. We got started with two-year-olds and they’re still a very important element of the set-up here. If you get success there seems to be a certain momentum about it.”The impetus has brought him, Romantic Liason apart, Tomba, who secured the trainer’s first Group One success when winning the Prix de la Foret at Longchamp in 1998, and Bad As I Wanna Be, who won the Prix Morny at the same level two years later.The celebration party after the latter’s victory started with a group of four in a small restaurant owned by a fisherman near Deauville, but in two hours had swelled to 20 or more guests. The seafood population in Normandy and the French grape community as a whole fear a repetition to this day.And then there was the case for Sarava, the most expensive yearling Meehan has ever purchased at $250,000 [£162,000] in the United States, who was unplaced in three starts last season in Britain.The Irishman’s belief in the horse was, however, gloriously confirmed when Sarava was repatriated with Ken McPeek. He became, at 70-1, the biggest outsider to win in 134 runnings of the Belmont Stakes, the third leg of the American Triple Crown, in June.”Okay, he didn’t win over here,” Meehan says, “but we did buy a top-class Classic winner. He’s a very valuable commodity now.”Meehan may be grateful for the way that chance has favoured him, and it is not a friend he wants to lose touch with easily.