YOU have to wind the clock back 23 years to find the first Aidan O’Brien Group 1 winner, training out of Ballydoyle. Of course, O’Brien remembers Desert King’s National Stakes win like it was yesterday.

“That was a very special day,” he recalls. “I don’t think he was a favourite on the day but he wasn’t a total outsider. He’d run a few times before and Christy Roche had rode him each time, and he thought he was a nice horse.