What more can be said about Eddie Lynam? He has consistently overachieved at racing’s top table considering the relatively small number of horses in his care, but all his previous achievements were topped by his performance at Royal Ascot last week. His four runners yielded three winners, including the two Group 1 sprints, which made him the leading Irish trainer at the meeting.

The talent of Sole Power and Slade Power was no secret going into the meeting, but they consolidated their positions as two of the finest sprinters in Europe at five and six furlongs respectively with performances of assured authority in their races.

The speed of the two-year-old filly Anthem Alexander was far from a secret either and the decision of her connections to turn down some big-money offers for her, which creates a new kind of pressure of its own, was thoroughly vindicated by her game win in the Queen Mary Stakes.

What is even more remarkable about the performance of the Lynam horses at Royal Ascot is that, far from the usual blue-blooded homebreds that would never come on the market or big-money yearling purchase profiles of many Royal Ascot winners, his three stars could easily have been bought by pretty much any trainer in the land.

Sole Power was the only one of the three to successfully change hands at the sales, having been bought by Lynam for just £32,000 at Doncaster. Slade Power was bought back for just £5,000 as a yearling and Anthem Alexander failed to sell for 48,000gns last October.

Indeed, this has been a trend for all of Lynam’s stars in recent years, with his other group-class sprinters Balmont Mast and Viztoria having been unsold as yearlings for just €16,000 and 9,000gns respectively. By all accounts, to his great credit, Lynam has made a very lucrative habit of forging diamonds from what the yearling market has written off as lumps of coal.

As impressive as all of the above is, it looks even better when you consider that Lynam had less than 50 individual runners in 2013, which is a very modest number compared to the leading trainers in Ireland and a tiny number compared to the most prolific trainers in Britain against whom he was competing against all last week.

It is also worth noting that of Lynam’s five top sprinters mentioned above, four of them are bred in Ireland. We have known it for years, but last week hammered home the fact that Irish trainers and breeders can produce top-class sprinters, yet our racing programme does not cater to them.

Ireland needs Group 1 and Group 2 sprints as well as a proper sprint programme to back them up so that Irish trainers, owners and breeders can justify keeping promising sprinters in this country.