MARK Twain’s famous quip noting the wild exaggeration surrounding reports of his demise comes to mind after talking to John Oxx.

There is no masking his gradual reversal of fortunes in recent times, having succeeded his father of the same name at Currabeg in 1979, and enhanced its already considerable reputation as an elite training establishment.

John Oxx senior produced eight classic winners but his son brought the operation to a whole new level, enjoying top-tier success at home and abroad.

Ridgewood Pearl, Timarida, Sinndar, Alamshar, Azamour were just some of the equine stars he handled with customary patience, guiding them to elevated feats of magnificence.

And then there was Sea The Stars, who set new levels of superlative achievement. The everyday punter takes the preparation of such talents for granted but the instinct and knowledge to know when to back off or when to push can be the difference between ruining a prospect and helping him realise his potential.

Having trained Sinndar to become the only horse to add the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe to an Epsom/Curragh Derby double, Oxx guided Sea The Stars to a different unique feat, garnering a second success in the Longchamp feature for the trainer after previously bagging the 2000 Guineas at Newmarket and the Epsom Derby.

In all, the Tsui family’s colt won six Group 1s that season. It was 2009 and John Oxx was on top of the world.

45 HORSES

Now, Currabeg houses 45 horses and on Wednesday night Xebec gave them just their ninth winner of the campaign. Six of those victories have come in maidens, three in handicaps. Of just 88 runners before racing on Thursday, a mere seven were in group contests.

None of this has come as any surprise to the trainer and in fact, the rate of success in the past two months has been very positive indeed.

So if you are expecting to find him wallowing in self-pity, think again. John Oxx is the poster boy for Kipling’s line on treating triumph and disaster similarly. He enjoyed the great days no doubt, but never got carried away. And now that fortunes have waned, he is equally measured.

He speaks philosophically about the changes in circumstance and the stock available to him now. One senses that in what is a truly testing time for all bar a handful of trainers in Ireland right now, he is well aware that a lot of handlers would love to have 45 horses to work with. Why should he be immune from a reversal of fortune?

The most impressive and absolutely resolute message from Currabeg though is that he is not finished. Racing never offered anybody any guarantees so all you can do in the meantime is knuckle down.

By his own reckoning, he is working harder than ever, still hungry and ambitious, targeting a return to the championship arena.

There is satisfaction in finding winning opportunities, and the horses running in and around their capabilities. You would expect any competitor to be mildly irritated by the 16 second-place finishes, even the 10 thirds but they reflect a general well-being among the Currabeg charges.

RUNNING WELL

“Our horses are running well,” Oxx agrees. “They are what they are. They’re just running up to their best, fighting out the finish. When you have a few seconds you’re always a bit annoyed that they’re not first but it’s better to have them running well, fighting out the finish than not. They’re running up to their ability and you can’t ask for more than that.

“We don’t have many three-year-olds this year. We started off last year with a reasonable number of them but we sold a few that won last season, we sold others that weren’t much good and retired a few to stud. So we ended up with a poor number of three-year-olds and I hadn’t the runners to get on the board. I wasn’t expecting any early but once Arch Sting had our first on June 19th, we’ve had nine winners in the last nine weeks and many more in the frame.

“But we’ve nice two-year-olds, some to run this year and some to wait ‘til next year. Hopefully we’ll have some nice ones to run before the end of the year.”

Sea Of Grace is one of a number of horses he has for the Tsuis and she will take her chance in the Group 3 Flame Of Tara Stakes tomorrow, after following up a nice Curragh debut in June with a cosy maiden success over a subsequent winner at Tipperary seven weeks ago. She should benefit from the legendary Oxx patience.

“She was supposed to run in the Debutante last weekend but she’d a slight setback the previous weekend and although she recovered quickly from it I couldn’t be 100% happy that she would run her best. Fortunately there’s a race for her next Sunday instead. It’s over a mile, I would have preferred to run her at seven but it’s an opportunity to get her out.

“She likes a little ease in the ground so we’d need the odd shower to keep the ground right. She seems to be back in form and we’re looking forward to running her again.

“She’s quite a big, strong filly and has done a lot of growing in the last six months so she’s a filly you’d expect to improve with a bit of time and age so I’m hoping she will progress from the first two runs but we’ll have to wait for the racecourse to confirm it.”

Whatever happens, one suspects that her best won’t reveal itself until next season.

“I think so. Born To Sea stock should improve with time and age. Urban Sea, at the end of the day, her influence will prevail probably. She’s a filly that still has to fill her frame a little bit so you’d expect her three-year-old year to be her best.”

There were no real reasons for his slow start other than an absence of ammunition. One or two might have underperformed but he just didn’t have the bullets to fire. As the season evolves, more opportunities present themselves.

“You have to work with what you’ve got,” he says with a chuckle. “You can’t change the situation. You just have to keep your head and train them the way they have to be trained. Just because you haven’t as many winners as before or as many horses, you can’t wave a magic wand and get them to do what they’re not capable of. You just have to think of the horses first and do what’s right by them at all times and hopefully then things will go well for you.”

SCALED EVEREST

But when you have scaled Everest, isn’t a hike up the Hill of Allen deflating?

“It’s life. I’ve seen it all before. It’s happened to other people and this doesn’t surprise me. It’s not a shock. I have to expect it. Things ebb and flow. Alright, there’s been a fair old dip but you just have to keep your head down and keep up your standards, keep the place running to the highest standard you can.

“We’ve had great support from very nice people and we’ve just got to turn it around. It will take time. It’s not easy and I knew it wouldn’t be. We just have to keep working and everybody’s got to keep working. I’ve good staff, great owners and we just need to get the numbers up a little bit and hopefully enough quality too in time.

“It’s a competitive business. Everybody goes through difficult times and I know what it’s like for trainers in general. It’s a tough time and most trainers in Ireland don’t have enough horses and are struggling to win races.

“It’s just a fact of life, with the recession and everything economically that has gone on, there wouldn’t be any more than half a dozen trainers in Ireland who’d have the number of horses they’d like to have. So what has happened to me wouldn’t be anything that a lot of other trainers haven’t experienced as well. We just have to get on with it and we’re optimistic with the way things are going.”

He is active at the sales although he tends to buy to order rather than on spec, while breeders have always sent horses his way. Interestingly though, he states an ambition to buy speedier horses than he has been generally associated with.

“When you train for 25 years for the Aga Khan, who generally has slower-developing horses, people often pigeonhole you and think that’s all you’re any good to train. But when you’ve never had anything else that’s of course what you train. But I’d always like to have more precocious horses, more two-year-old types, if I could.

“I remember Henry Candy and his father had a lot of stayers. His father had a reputation for training stayers and Henry started that way, but when his clientele changed, he started buying sharper horses and now he’s the sprint king!

“Training horses is all about training horses and good trainers can train all sorts of horses but sometimes they just don’t get the opportunity.”

AGA KHAN

The racing world was shocked when the long-standing partnership with the Aga Khan came to an end. Oxx insists that he doesn’t dwell on history, apart from remembering the good days fondly.

“I trained for him for 25 years. We had great success and I’d say for most of that time, we had a very good working relationship. He was a good man to work for and easy to train for, very supportive. I was very lucky that he sent me good horses and we had great success and I’m happy with that.

“All these things tend not to last forever and that’s how I look on it. I don’t have any regrets. The past is the past, the future is the future and I don’t think about it anymore.”

Yet watching Harzand do the Derby double must have been a sickener, you venture. After all, he had trained the sire (Sea The Stars) and the dam (Hazariya). Instead, he assures you that he greeted the success with delight and reveals his good humour in explaining why.

“The plan would have been when Sea The Stars went to Giltown, that he might have an influence on the Aga Khan’s Irish population of mares and here it is, it’s happened. That was the plan but it wasn’t the plan I suppose at the time that I wouldn’t be training him but you have to laugh at that. It was great to see him win the Derby because it was great for Sea The Stars and the plan came up – if not in its entirety!

“We were delighted. We cheered him home. It was a great day for the stallion.”

The warmth with which he speaks of Sea The Stars is evident, and of course, understandable.

“The whole thing was a blessing. You couldn’t have scripted it, you couldn’t have planned it. He just arrived. I thought Mrs Tsui was brave not to sell him as a yearling; she’d have got a record price for him. But she kept him and there you are; he was the perfect horse. You couldn’t have designed a better horse with all the qualities necessary: the looks, the pedigree. To breed a horse with his pedigree and then have him turn out so good.

“I’ve probably been misquoted a few times but I think what I said was that he was what 300 years of breeding the thoroughbred had arrived at. By that I meant that when you have a great pedigree, the best of breeding, then you foal the mare and the foal grows into a horse as beautiful as him and then to cap it all off, he’s a superstar. There’s no higher achievement in thoroughbred breeding. It was the pinnacle of achievement.

“Sometimes you get a very good horse but he doesn’t quite have the pedigree. He had the best pedigree and turned out to be as good as he possibly could be. We’re lucky nothing went wrong, he had a tremendous constitution. He was the total package. He could go anywhere, the result was always the same.”

IRISH CHAMPIONS WEEKEND

Sea The Stars was a wonderful winner of the Irish Champion Stakes, giving Oxx his third winner of the prestigious Group 1. He has annexed the Irish St Leger on four occasions. Now, these two races are at the epicentre of Irish Champions Weekend, a festival he hails as hugely positive for Irish flat racing, even if he is unlikely to be represented too heavily at Leopardstown or the Curragh this year.

“That two-week period before Champions Weekend was always one of the highlights of the season for me but it was also kind of the end of the season. You’d the Champion Stakes meeting at Leopardstown and then the week after the National Stakes and the Leger. They were the last big races of the year in Ireland so it was a very obvious thing to join them up. Like a lot of good ideas, afterwards you scratch your head and wonder ‘Why didn’t we do that years ago?’ Well done to all concerned, they’ve done a great job on it.

“It’s good to combine those two weekends into one and generate the competition over the two days.

“It generates a lot of extra interest and excitement. It got off to a great start the first year. It fits in neatly with Arc weekend and British Champions Day as well. It’s going to go from strength to strength I’m sure.”

The desire to be part of that progression is evident. The thought of training Group 1 winners and filling Currabeg once more is what sustains him. And he has a venerable colleague providing the best example possible.

“I’m as determined as ever, as interested as ever, as hard-working as ever. In fact I’ve never worked as hard in my life but I think every trainer will tell you the same. Whether you’re a big stable with a lot of big horses, or a smaller stable with a lot of ordinary horses, the work is still the same.”

“I intend to be training horses a long time, like Kevin Prendergast, who’s my neighbour here and I see him every day... He’s an inspiration to us all I can tell you. I think he’ll keep us all going for a long time yet.”