The familiar names who waved goodbye to their training careers

We see their names in the newspapers for so long that they become part of the familiar, part of the furniture. There's Colm Murphy with his Grade 1 stars, James Toller bringing along his old-school back-end two-year-olds, Ed McMahon with his flashy sprinters, Nick Littmoden making it pay with his handicappers. And then, suddenly, the name disappears and with it goes a career, a way of life.

If there was a name that appeared to have about it an air of permanence it was Murphy's, attached as it was to Cheltenham Festival winners, Grade 1 winners, stars of the scene in Ireland and in Britain. If anyone had tenure it was Murphy, so it seemed, and therefore it was a shock last September when the news broke that the end was not just nigh but now. It was not a shock to the Wexford man, however.

"We'd got below a certain number of horses and it wasn't really viable," he says. "We needed 40 or 50 to make it pay and in the end we were down to less than half that number.