Michael O’Leary, who runs his horses under the Gigginstown House Stud banner, is famous as the caustic boss of budget airline Ryanair, and is a man who doesn’t believe in throwing money away. When asked about the prospect of Ryanair charging passengers for use of in-flight toilets, he replied: “If someone wanted to pay £5 to go to the toilet I would carry them myself. I would wipe their bums for a fiver.”

He is the king of the one-liner, many of which have been derogatory about his industry and even his customers. It’s something of a wonder that he’s never thought of calling one of his horses No Refunds.

Given that typical riposte from O’Leary, it comes as a surprise that he’s continued his involvement in racing ownership given how disastrously it started. The first few years in which horses ran in the Gigginstown livery saw little return on investment, and the biggest earners, Tuco and Inexorable (a half-brother to Best Mate), were killed in action as novices having shown immense promise. Many would have blanched at the thought of further investment, and it wasn’t sentiment, but something more prosaic which saw O’Leary and brother Eddie plough on.

“I get a pain in the face reading [about] these people who’ve been racing for one day and suddenly it’s their lifelong passion,” he says, and unlike most big owners, he doesn’t buy horses with Cheltenham in mind, claiming he’s just as happy watching a point-to-point on a freezing Sunday in January as he is cheering one home in a Grade 1 in March. Depending on the result, naturally.

If the viability of racehorse ownership was being called into question, then the arrival of War Of Attrition came at just the right time, and the son of Presenting marked himself down as a future Gold Cup horse when making Brave Inca pull out all the stops in the 2004 Supreme. He failed to fire a year later when favourite for the Arkle, but put that behind him with a memorable win under Conor O’Dwyer in the Gold Cup itself in 2006, beating Hedgehunter and Forget The Past in providing an Irish-trained 1-2-3.

Weapon’s Amnesty was another who took his form up a notch at Prestbury Park, winning the Albert Bartlett (2009) and RSA Chase (2010) before injury curtailed his career, and if there is one regret that O’Leary might have, it’s that he never got his chance to add the Gold Cup to that impressive tally.

There have been numerous handicap winners in the maroon-and-white silks in recent years, but O’Leary has no love for such races, merely seeing them as a stepping-stone on the path to the Gold Cup somewhere down the line.

He’s not notably fond of hurdles, either, and would presumably have got on very well with the late Capt Tim Forster. He’s won the Festival’s least sexy race, the Martin Pipe, twice with Sir Des Champs and Don Poli, and both went on to win Grade 1s over fences a year later. That’s a tribute to the skills of their trainers, but also to the man upon whom Michael deflects all the praise.

While most in the racing game are described succinctly as “messers”, Eddie O’Leary clearly belongs in the prized minority, and his brother admits that he couldn’t hope to succeed without his guiding hand.

Another Gold Cup win courtesy of the now-retired Don Cossack last spring suggests the Gigginstown story has a few chapters left to run.