THE numbers are staggering, the records legion. Reel just a few of them off and there is a danger of the impact being diluted. So how do you put all that Dermot Weld has done into context?

Leading trainer in terms of winners at the Galway Festival 29 times is a stat that takes hold for its enduring dominance. It illustrates a pursuit of winners, regardless of prize or status. More startling in that regard though is the fact that he set a new mark for winners recorded by an Irish trainer - 15 years ago.

The big ones are what matter though. So far, he has 22 European classic victories and has won each of the Irish versions at least once. Most of the top targets of recognised National Hunt handlers have been landed too. Throw in three Cheltenham Festival successes for good measure.

Sprinters, milers, stayers. Hurdlers and chasers.

Not content with all that, Weld was pushing back international boundaries long before anyone else. The only European trainer to claim a leg of the American Triple Crown when Go And Go won the Belmont Stakes in 1990, the only northern hemisphere trainer to prepare a winner of the Melbourne Cup when Vintage Crop did the business three years later. Japanese and French successes have followed but only Weld has done it twice.

Home and away.

It is the pioneering spirit of an individual that changed the game completely. Those US and Australia feats were stupefying, coming at a time when in racing terms, trainers thought the world was flat and you would fall off the side if you left your own patch.

Dermot Weld didn’t see obstacles. He saw opportunities. Just because nobody had ever tried something before didn’t mean it was impossible.

Perhaps the clearest indication of this was a venture that didn’t pay off - running Vintage Crop in the 1993 Champion Hurdle. It was the gelding’s first run since bolting up by eight lengths under Walter Swinburn in the English Cesarewitch at Newmarket five months previously. What’s more, he had only run in two hurdle races in his life and though winning both, the last one had been a novice event during the Christmas Leopardstown Festival in December 1991.

In the end, inexperience told as Vintage Crop stayed on to be sixth, less than nine lengths behind Granville Again and Peter Scudamore. You couldn’t get too many more daring tilts at a major prize though. Convention be damned.

They told him he was mad then and repeated the cant when he brought the durable six-year-old down under but that talk stopped when he shocked the world in Flemington, a little more than seven months after rocking up at Cheltenham.

OPPORTUNITY

But this is a man who was talking about the Ascot Gold Cup as a possibility for Windsor Park in the winner’s enclosure at the foot of the Cotswolds, minutes after Dr Ronan Lambe’s exciting prospect had landed the Neptune Investment Novices’ Hurdle quite comfortably last March. He doesn’t wear blinkers and just sees a bounty of opportunity.

Vision, courage, stubbornness, single-mindedness and self-belief are just some of the traits that have led to a stacked CV as one of the most revered trainers in the world since taking over from his later father Charlie in 1972. He maintains that determination and hard work are the key characteristics picked up from his parents.

If his father died young, Marguerite was the epitome of fortitude until her death in April 2014.

“She died when she was 98 years of age and was completely involved right up to the very end.”

The involvement was in breeding at Springbank Way, with remarkable success. Weld has taken over now, with the sale of a Dubawi colt out of Nightime at Goffs yesterday sure to have been somewhat emotional.

“You run a business and that’s why you have to sell. We sold a nice filly as a yearling last year, Only Mine the filly of Joe Murphy’s (that won a listed race in Newmarket last month). You have to run a business and my mother always ran it as a business. So I plan to do the same.”

Nightime was special, being a homebred filly who won the Irish 1000 Guineas in the breeder’s colours in 2006. Mother and son had combined in similar fashion to garner the Irish Derby with Grey Swallow two years earlier. There wasn’t a dry eye in the Curragh.

“My mother never kept more than seven mares and in the last years of her life, to breed and to own two classic winners was superb… that was a tremendous feat and naturally it gave us huge enjoyment to be able to win those two classics for her.”

FORGOTTEN RULES

The sales are just one part of what is keeping him occupied now. So too the select National Hunt team that will be supplemented by Forgotten Rules, who has impressed in schooling and is likely to make his debut over sticks at Leopardstown over Christmas. The flat group winner has the potential to be top drawer as winter soft ground will suit much more than summer quick.

He is excited by Windsor Park and Silver Concorde too, having learned last year that the latter certainly needs good ground. Meanwhile, Christmas will decide whether it is the Champion Hurdle or World Hurdle with Windsor Park.

Family and friendship means a lot to Weld though so there was a lot of satisfaction when Show Court, owned by his son Kris, won at Limerick last Sunday week on Limerick’s fundraising day for Robbie McNamara.

“I was pleased for Kris. It was an emotional day. Robbie was a huge part of the set-up here. He was a brilliant rider. I think it was worked out he had something like a 46 or 48% strike rate on the horses he rode for me. It was a remarkable record.

“The ride he gave Silver Concorde in the Cheltenham bumper, to get up to beat Ruby… to run up the inside of Ruby, to have the coolness and the confidence. He sat and waited. Ruby Walsh is gone and your man is still sitting! To ride the rail all the way around Cheltenham. Ruby Walsh is there (in front of him on Shaneshill).

“(Robbie’s thinking) ‘Ruby Walsh? So what? He’s just another jockey.’ And up his inside.

“He was an outstanding jockey.”

Weld becomes quite animated describing the ride, his hands alternating between gesticulation and holding the reins, beaming with pride at the temerity of McNamara, and the Croom man’s quantity of on-horse swagger that all top pilots possess. The trainer knows a thing or two about riding, having been champion amateur three times and won Galway’s amateur handicap in 1964, the day before his 16th birthday.

“The whole thing is about confidence. You have to go out in every race believing you can win. If you don’t go out believing you can win, it makes it harder. You don’t always have to have the best horse to win. I learned that at a very young age. With tactics and confidence, you can.”

FAMILY

Kris and his other son Mark are leading players of the operation, both breeding and training, but there is no succession plan in place. Marguerite Weld was breeding horses at 98 years of age. Don’t expect to see her son swanning off into the sunset in his 60s.

Training at his level, with 100-120 mostly high calibre thoroughbreds, is a management situation now. It could never be a one-man show so the input of Kris and Mark, as well as others, is imperative.

Free Eagle and Fascinating Rock provided the seasonal highlights on the flat in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes and British Champion Stakes respectively.

“Both Free Eagle and Fascinating Rock are rated equal seventh in the world ratings at the moment. To have two horses of that calibre is exciting.”

The former is still on target to conclude his racing career on the fast ground he loves at Hong Kong in December before moving on to the Irish National Stud, while Fascinating Rock could resume in Dubai.

The yearning to expand his horizons in a racing sense came from his days doing veterinary work in Australia and America, he reckons.

“I loved the idea of bringing horses to these countries and letting them see what the Irish could do. The Australians maintained theirs were the best, the Americans maintained that theirs were the best. Then it was maintained that actually no horse could go from the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere to win the Melbourne Cup. Certainly up here, it was a mad idea. Absolutely mad. In the southern hemisphere, they didn’t think very much, hence the starting price of 28/1, which Vintage Crop was, because it was ridiculous nonsense to think that you could bring a horse down from the northern hemisphere in the off-season and win a Melbourne Cup.”

But this was Dermot Weld and nothing was impossible.

YOUNGEST VET

The youngest qualified veterinary surgeon in Ireland when he graduated from UCD, he has always retained close ties with his alma mater. Eight days ago, he received an UCD Foundation Day Alumni Award at a ceremony in O’Reilly Hall. It came 14 years after he had been presented with the college’s Charter Day medal. Both recognise his achievements as a world renowned trainer, but also his work on behalf of UCD.

Weld has been on UCD governing councils. He chaired the committee that oversaw the sale of the old veterinary school on Shelbourne Road where he attended lectures, and the development of the current facility. He insists that while much of the credit for producing “one of the most modern (veterinary schools) in Europe” came his way, most of the work was done by Professor Michael Monaghan.

It meant a lot though because he had great memories of his times in UCD, where the likes of John Powell (senior steward of the National Hunt committee) and Terry Smith (senior veterinary officer for the Turf Club) were contemporaries.

“Michael Burke, who now owns Chanelle Laboratories, has had horses in training with me for many years and is Tony McCoy’s father-in-law (was there too). We met in first year and have been close friends ever since. He had a very nice two-year-old colt with me this year called Maneen. He ran second in Navan and finished strongly in a field of 15 and will be a lovely horse next year.

“And a very good friend of mine called Edward O’Brien Lynch, whose family were always involved in horses, was there too. Edward’s father bred an Irish 2000 Guineas winner and always had horses with my father.”

Weld graduated despite his fairly extensive riding duties.

“I was leading amateur three times while I was in college. I think it was when I was 18, 19 and 20. I was very fortunate that some of my lecturers were understanding when I occasionally missed lectures. In those days we had lectures on a Saturday morning and that was the biggest inconvenience I had as they could clash with Navan or Naas or somewhere and you’d be in a hurry to get out. We had some close calls. We used to have tutorials on a Thursday afternoon and I remember escaping from them to maybe drive down to Clonmel or somewhere. That was a little bit of an ordeal but it worked out in the end.”

Just a bit.

HUNGER

You don’t become a serial record-breaker without evolving, maintaining an insatiable hunger and looking forward. There isn’t an incessant drive to win particular races mind you, just to win the ones the horses are suited to. Dermot Weld is really looking forward to 2016.

“Our two-year-olds this year were a little bit backward but we tended recently to train less the kind of sprint two-year-olds that I used to have. I’ve been fortunate to train 22 European classic winners and I suppose you’re always looking to try and train the next classic horse.

“I’m not one to say ‘I have to win this or that’. I’ve never won the Epsom Derby or the Kentucky Derby… but if you get the right horse for the right race we’ll go for it. I’m very comfortable with what we’ve achieved.

“It’s a busy time now because we have yearlings coming in. I suppose it’s like going to big school. The new pupils are all coming in. The first years are all arriving.

“I always think it’s a very exciting time of the year. Some of them you’ve seen at the sales and some of them are coming from stud farms and maybe you have seen them as younger horses. You’re seeing how they’ve progressed, how they’ve matured and you’re looking forward to seeing a new team.

“The whole thing is if you’re fortunate to keep them healthy. And if we can keep our horses healthy, well then we’ll win a lot of races.”

Plus ça change.

YESTERDAY at Goffs, Weld sold his Dubawi colt out of Nightime to John Ferguson, agent for Sheikh Mohammed, for €1.1 million. Nightime was a home-bred filly who won the Irish 1000 Guineas in his mother Marguerite’s colours in 2006.

“I’M very positive about it. I think we have overcome a number of very difficult years extremely well. We’re very fortunate that we’ve had good government support and recognition for what racing is in this country - an industry and a huge employer. I think it has a very bright future. We’re continually producing the top horses in the world. We have the people, right through the breeding operations, the stud farms, the staff that work every day with the horses, the jockeys and the trainers. I don’t see any country in the world that I have visited that has a stronger set-up than Ireland.”

“WE all get on. The excellent fundraiser for Robbie showed Irish racing in an excellent light. We support our own when tragedy happens. Equally, I’m proud to say that the relationship between Irish trainers at the top end is excellent. The friendship between Aidan (O’Brien), Jim (Bolger) and myself and many others is very strong. Now that doesn’t mean that we don’t want to knock lumps out of one another when we’re racing! But we are very supportive of one another and I think that’s rare.”