Genius who altered the face of racing

IN 2003, nine years after his retirement, horse racing's trade paper, the Racing Post, asked its readers around the world to select the sport's 100 greatest figures. The runaway number one was Vincent O'Brien, clear of his former jockey Lester Piggott.

A few years earlier the Irishman had been selected as the greatest flat trainer of the 20th century. Then the same thing happened in the jumps trainer category. O'Brien won that too. The Racing Post's headline wrote itself: "The Greatest".

The quiet man from north Cork duly accepted such plaudits, graciously making all the right noises, and leaving nobody in any doubt that he would be more comfortable looking at a horse or maybe angling for a good salmon.

Such modern media phenomenon as black and white lists would not have appealed to someone whose whole life and career was a monument to nuance and instinct.

Enough fish got away from O'Brien on the Blackwater to make his fishing skills recognisable to anyone. But no one has ever looked at a horse and seen what O'Brien could see. It is what made him unique and as close to a genius as racing has ever seen.

Certainly in terms of achievement, but also long-term impact on an entire industry, it is easy to make a case for him as being the greatest sporting figure Ireland has ever produced. O'Brien would have shied away from such definitive statements too but a fundamental shyness should never be confused with diffidence. Because the more one looks at such a remarkable life and career, the one thing that shines out from it is self-confidence.

Not brashness or cockiness but an unobtrusive ease with himself that combined with unequalled perception of all things equine made him a world-renowned figure. And it all happened in an Ireland a long way removed from the rather boorish attitude of recent memory.

He was a man, after all, born into a largely poor and rural country that was still part of the British Empire.

Born on Good Friday, 1917, the madness of Passchendaele and Ypres were still in the future. Later attempting to build a career in 1940s Ireland was daunting enough to have most men willing and happy to accept survival, especially in as cut-throat a business as racing.

But in a country desperately short of opportunity and plagued with an introspection whose impact is still being felt today, Vincent O'Brien looked at a world far beyond Ireland and fancied his chances of conquering it.

It's the sort of "vision thing" that is so desperately rare and so wonderfully thrilling to witness. In 1949, O'Brien hired an ex-RAF transport plane to fly three horses to the Cheltenham Festival, the first time air-transport was used for racehorses. All three won.

The fruits of such an obviously restless and inquisitive mind mounted up through the years. He was one of the first to appreciate the abilities of North American-bred horses and also to appreciate the financial muscle of American businessmen who could afford to invest in the best bloodstock on both sides of the Atlantic.

There was the seismic shift of emphasis from the jumps to flat racing in the late 1950s that now looks inevitable but at the time was a jump into the unknown. Whatever about Grand Nationals and Gold Cups, horses trained in Ireland at that time rarely, if ever, escaped the status of poor relation in international flat racing.

But O'Brien always fancied his chances and over four decades fundamentally altered the face of both the racing and the breeding industry.

The strength of ambition and mind required to do that is still staggering to ponder, and it was all rooted in a faith in his own judgment.

Evidence of that judgment is now rooted in every corner of the world. The urge to compete and to gamble means racing is a truly global sport. Somewhere in South America right now, or in Australia, or Korea, or anywhere else where people thrill to the sight of a galloping thoroughbred, there will be someone looking over a horse whose pedigree has the initials IRL next to its name and wondering "what if". That is the extent of Vincent O'Brien's achievement.

And on Saturday at Epsom there will be a three-year-old colt who suddenly looks to have the most appropriate name imaginable.

By Sadler's Wells, a champion O'Brien moulded into the greatest stallion ever to stand in Ireland, the colt is trained at Ballydoyle, the Co Tipperary base from which O'Brien took on the world. He has a chance too, and a chance is all Vincent O'Brien ever needed to back himself.

Masterofthehorse suddenly and sadly has a world of sentiment riding on his back.