How modesty triumphed in the Derby

In the absence on her Platinum Jubilee of Her Majesty, such an avid Derby attender in the past, and following the death just days before of the legendary Lester Piggott, it could have been a low-key, insignificant Derby. Instead, a truly impressive victory for the favourite, Desert Crown, turned it into a different kind of celebration.

He had never really been away, but how the crowd welcomed the comeback when Desert Crown won Sir Michael Stoute his sixth Derby, becoming at 76 the oldest to perform the feat. The previous holder of the record was the 75-year-old Matt Dawson with Sir Visto in 1895, but in those days there were no Coolmores and Godolphins to face with their batteries of expensive, impeccably bred contestants. Had Sir Michael begun to fear that his victory in the great race with Workforce in 2010 would turn out to be his last? ‘I didn’t know. You realise as time goes by that your chances lessen. I didn’t sit down and think about it year after year but it has been a lot of years.’

We tend to see Aidan O’Brien as the Derby genius with eight victories already to his name, but he has had 95 horses run in the race. Sir Michael hadn’t had a single contestant for six years and his six victories have come from just 38 runners, double the Irish maestro’s strike rate. But racing isn’t just about the numbers; it is, too, about the emotion, about character and respect for those who have the patience needed to turn the good into the best.

Sir Michael is a modest, sometimes shy man with no great taste for the spotlight, who has to be coaxed to deliver more than a sentence or two on his latest success, but I suspect he has come to enjoy his enforced meetings with the media rather more than he lets on.