'You think you're busy as assistant - now I realise I wasn't doing a half-speed'

It was Harry Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, who famously had a sign on his desk that read' 'The Buck Stops Here'. If Harry Derham had a desk, he might be tempted to have a similar sign made, to remind him of one of the immovable fundamentals of being a racehorse trainer, where once he was a mere assistant.

Nobody is expecting the 28-year-old Lambourn-based rookie to nullify the threat of North Korea in the global arena or sanction the use of nuclear weapons in Berkshire, but what he realised very quickly after emerging from beneath the wing of his former boss (and uncle) Paul Nicholls was that, when you take out a licence, there's nobody to turn to but yourself.

Truman said it himself, roughly translated into racing terms: "The greatest part of the trainer's job is to make decisions – big ones and small ones, dozens of them almost every day. No-one else can do the deciding for him. That's his job."