'We don't get bluebloods sent to us - but if we get a good horse we can take them to the top'

Life is simple when you're young, as all old people know. Obstacles look surmountable, impediments seem microscopic and the gods of misfortune bare their teeth only in the process of smiling on the righteous.

Rod Millman, at 68, has been around long enough to know better, and his son Pat has cottoned on, but back in 2006, Millman jnr had yet to be disabused of the notion. Sergeant Cecil, the superstar of the family yard, was in the process of completing a historic treble in the Northumberland Plate, Ebor and Cesarewitch and it was hard for an impressionable lad to believe the world was anything but a bowl of cherries.

"I was 13 when he won all those big handicaps and I thought that was normal," says the now 33-year-old assistant trainer, with a mixture of faint embarrassment and gradual realisation. "It felt as though it just happened like that – win a big race and just keep winning – and then I realised there are a lot more slow horses out there than fast ones.