Aidan O'Brien: deeply intense, fiercely ambitious and phenomenally successful

One of the great fallacies propagated by racing cynics holds that the key to Aidan O’Brien’s epoch-defining legacy is the access he has to a production line of rarefied pedigrees. The theory goes that it is easier to succeed than fail with so many majestic equine bluebloods.

It is and it isn’t, because such a misconception fails spectacularly to give due credence to the vast range of skills required to train, place and manage such a volume of horses and the infrastructure and staff that goes with them.

Nor does it do justice to the mental fortitude or diplomatic nous that are prerequisites when you are a general to horseracing’s single most prolific commercial conglomerate, a global empire dependent in the first instance on spoils won on the battlefield.