Aidan O'Brien

I think it’s vital that it looks like normality will resume in terms of full attendances at Irish race meetings from October. I think it’s very important for atmosphere and interest. When you go racing when there is a crowd there, there is a totally different atmosphere for everybody, horses, jockeys, owners, trainers. And that’s what racing is all about. It has to be a spectacle. It has to be somewhere that everybody wants to go and when they do go to enjoy it really. For the future of racing it’s very important. Hopefully it will be brilliant.

It’s been very strange since we went into our first lockdown. Last year was a very funny year. It was very hard to get horses right. We went with it that we were just trying to get the two-year-olds out and get experience into them and try and educate them really for this year. The older horses, it was very compressed season, you just had to be careful with horses. Obviously, it didn’t suit every horse and you weren’t really going to know the ones that it suited until you started racing. But it was great that racing was on.

It was nearly shocking going to York and hearing the crowds again after so long. You really forget what it was like from the last year and a half when there was no atmosphere and every day was kind of like a schooling day or a working away day for horses. I suppose the noise and the atmosphere that a crowd, and the energy that a crowd can drum up or can add to a day is just incredible. You just forget, you nearly get taken aback by it when it does happen.

Irish Champions Weekend is an unbelievably prestigious weekend for everybody so hopefully we will have good crowds for that. In racing terms, it has the perfect slot in the calendar. It’s held at two absolutely world class tracks. All the right races are there for whatever horses who want to compete in them, horses from all over the world really. It has been a serious initiative really and it has made a massive difference to the whole Irish flat programme and breeding industry. I think it has been an incredible success.

The Curragh as we know, is an absolutely world class track. It is very fair, it’s very untactical. The facilities are unbelievable there now too. The two-year-old races are on the straight track which is very fair. The Leger is the open track and it’s a very fair mile-and-six as well.

Leopardstown is a great track. Usually they go a real good gallop down the back in the Irish Champion Stakes and they take the big sweeping bend into the straight but it does rise up to the winning post. It’s a tough enough mile-and-a-quarter, and the Irish Champion Stakes has been an unbelievably competitive highly-rated race for a number of years and has been the world number one on a few occasions, I think. It could be the same this year when St Mark’s Basilica could be our only runner.

We are just so lucky to have those tracks here in Ireland and to be able to put on these races one day after the other.

The horses have been running well, or some of them at least going into it. We are going okay I think really. Some of them that haven’t been winning have been running well so that’s good.

Some of the media have been talking about the world record for Group 1 or Grade 1 wins in a calendar year on the flat, that we are at a similar schedule to 2017 when we finished with 28.

Really, we kind of take one race at a time. We’re doing our best. We try and compete all over the world with horses in everywhere. But a lot of things have to fall right for you for those things to happen. And obviously, as you see, sometimes it does and more often than not it doesn’t but you have to try and you have to compete. You do your best for it to happen but it’s very difficult.

We never set targets we just take one race at a time. When we get beat, we just try to recover after the race and get ourselves back together straight away and see what happened and reassess and go forward. And when we win, we just try not to get carried away and keep as focused as we can onto the next day. That’s the way it is. The reality of it is, it’s usually disappointment after disappointment and you can’t let it get you down but at the same time it has to hurt because if it doesn’t it’s no good. It needs to make you try and improve for the next time.

That’s what we do all the time. We assess what happened, why it happened and can we try and not let it happen again if we lose. And if we win then we try and learn maybe, this was the right thing to do. But we just take one race at a time and keep trying and see what happens. Hopefully at the end of it all, at the end of the year we’re still standing!