'He was a cantankerous bugger. How Henry Cecil trained him, I'll never know'

Old-timers always like to think they grew up in the Golden Age of everything. In their day they had Elizabeth I instead of Elizabeth II, Humphrey Bogart instead of Dwayne Johnson, vinyl instead of Spotify, and lots of sport that would have knocked spots off what passes for sport these days.

In racing, meanwhile, although whippersnappers who have lived through the domination of Yeats and Stradivarius might beg to differ, there is really only one era that can justifiably be described as golden for staying races, and that's the era of Le Moss and Ardross.

With the likes of three-time Ascot Gold Cup winner Sagaro, the brilliant yet brittle Buckskin and the interloper Shangamuzo to provide foundation and context, the pair lit up the late 1970s and set the early 1980s ablaze, straddling the decades with a gargantuan rivalry that is yet to be matched in 40 subsequent years of competition.