'The next target has to be number one spot. It's a massive dream and it's going to be hard, but you have to keep aiming high'

There are very few downsides to being young, as anybody old will tell you, but one is that you've had so little time to become yourself that everybody wants to compare you to somebody else.

So, Billy Loughnane is saddled with a few half-arsed nicknames, like Billy the Kid (after a murderous Wild West outlaw) and Billy Whizz (the speedy boy with his own Beano comic strip), because nobody can be bothered to come up with anything better, and then the hasty tributes begin.

The 18-year-old's 'choirboy' looks inevitably lead us to the conclusion that he's the best we've seen since the great Walter Swinburn. His early stats are right up there with Frankie Dettori's, so they say. Thankfully he's not yet the new Ryan Moore, but at 5ft 11in he's tall enough to have been mentioned in the same breath as Lester 'The Long Fellow' Piggott, who had already retired twice 11 years before Billy was born.