Top trainer Fergal O’Brien heads to Cheltenham Racecourse on Saturday for Festival Trials Day in buoyant mood.

The 49-year-old is on course to smash last season’s career-best 104 winners and is in there mixing it with the biggest and best names in the land.

“It’s an incredible story,” said his business partner Chris Coley. “And the thing is that this season we’ve had more 2nd places than 1sts, it’s an amazing fact and proves the horses are running really well.

“We’ve proved that last season wasn’t a fluke, it wasn’t a one-off, we’ve proved the consistency is there.”

They certainly have – they had 60-plus winners in 2019/20 – and while there’s been plenty of excitement on the racecourse, there’s been plenty going on away from it too because towards the end of last year O’Brien teamed up with fellow trainer Graeme McPherson to form O’Brien McPherson Racing.

McPherson, based in Stow-on-the-Wold, is just a handful of miles from where O’Brien operates at Ravenswell Farm between Withington and Compton Abdale. The new arrangement sees O’Brien, who moved to his stable two-and-a-half years ago, taking the lead role on the training side.

“We’ve now got about 150 horses on our books,” enthused Coley. “Once you have a few winners it sort of snowballs – more horses, more owners, more big wins. From our point of view it’s quite simple, we’ve got someone who knows what he’s doing and how to make the most of his facilities.”

O’Brien is currently fourth in the trainers’ championship and in terms of winners he is right up there with champion trainer Paul Nicholls, although when it comes to prize money – which is how the championship is decided – Nicholls is some way out in front.

“You do need the Grade 1 winners,” said Coley. “We’re more than holding our own with winners and places, but it’s winning the big races with the big prize money that really counts, it doesn’t happen overnight.”

There are plenty of big races coming up with the Cheltenham Festival just around the corner, of course, and Coley admits that just like everyone else he is counting down the days to the start of the four-day spectacular on Tuesday 15^th March.

“Suddenly everybody is talking about the Festival,” he said. “Festival Trials Day will see a lot of horses with Festival entries, it just highlights how close it is.”

Coley, who saw O’Brien saddle his Poetic Rhythm to victory in the Grade 1 Challow Hurdle at Newbury in December 2017 – their first Grade 1 winner – will be there on Saturday, of course, and he has very good memories of the meeting.

“I had a 100-1 winner there with Baccalaureate,” he recalled. “It was the first 100-1 winner at Cheltenham since Norton’s Coin in the Gold Cup.”

That never-to-be forgotten day in the blue riband of National Hunt Racing was in 1990, 20 years before Paddy Brennan steered the Nigel Twiston-Davies-trained Baccalaureate to victory in the Betfair Finesse Juvenile Novices’ Hurdle.

And while that was a very good day – all days at Cheltenham are good when you have a winner! – it wasn’t quite the perfect day for Coley.

“I didn’t have a penny on it!” he said.