ON Thursday I was in London to witness Aidan O’Brien being presented with the Peter O’Sullevan Annual Award, the 23rd to be a recipient of the distinctive trophy. He joins an illustrious band of men and women and is fully deserving of his place among this pantheon of luminaries.

It is perhaps a little known fact that when Magna Grecia won the Group 1 Vertem Futurity Trophy at Doncaster recently he became the 150th individual winner at the highest level on the flat for Aidan. Such is the magnitude of the success he has enjoyed, since Desert King provided him with his first Group 1 win on the flat in the Aga Khan Studs National Stakes in the autumn of 1996, that such an achievement can go largely unnoticed.