Michael Stoute, sport’s great survivor, has Desert Crown primed for Derby

Shergar, Shahrastani and three more Derby winners have passed through Sir Michael Stoute’s stable over the last 50 years, as well as the winners of more than 100 Group One races. But he takes scarcely a moment to consider the options when asked to name his most memorable success. “Blue Cashmere in the [1973] Ayr Gold Cup,” he said at his Newmarket stable last week. “He paid some bills.”

It is a typically Stoutian response, one that would be familiar to any reporter on the racing beat over the past five decades. As would his standard reaction to a group of journalists pointing microphones in his direction, which is akin to the way Bear Grylls might treat an angry rattlesnake: edge backwards ever-so-slowly for a minute or two, and then make a run for it.

But then he is, after all, the sport’s greatest survivor, a fixed point on Newmarket’s Bury Road since the early 1970s as the careers of dozens of trainers in Flat racing’s capital city have waxed and waned. Punters who turned 18 and placed their first legal bets in 1972, when Stoute scraped together enough horses to take out a trainer’s licence, are now pensioners. And since his first Classic success, when Fair Salinia took the Oaks in 1978, just seven seasons have passed without at least one win for the stable in one of the handful of races with Group One status.

Victory for Stoute’s colt Desert Crown, the favourite, in the Cazoo Derby at Epsom on Saturday, would extend that record for another season. His fifth Derby victory would also arrive 41 years after the first, with Shergar in 1981, and eclipse the achievement of Mathew Dawson, one of the greatest trainers of the 19th century, who saddled Derby winners 35 years apart in 1860 and 1895.

Dawson was 75 years old when