Racing: Man from Limerick proving well versed in a harsh business

Folly House was the name of Brian Meehan's first stables but his shrewdness as a trainer sees him once more in expansionist mood

As you enter the office at Brian Meehan's Newlands stables in Upper Lambourn you can tell at once he is no fool. Before the interview even begins he gets his questions in first, such as inquiring if The Independent's racing correspondent has had far to come. It is a nice touch, lending the suggestion that is not to be an interview at all, rather a conversation among racing professionals.

Questions two and three seal it, involving as they do coffee and bacon butties. Meehan knows how to work with simple creatures of all description.

In this he is the image of his mentor, Richard Hannon, to whom he was assistant for six years. Meehan has none of the older man's obvious affability – he has the immediate look of Heathcliff having stepped in something nasty up on the moors – but once you get past the formidable countenance and eyebrows there is a considerable sense of humour to enjoy. Like Hannon, the 34-year-old does not find it difficult to celebrate.

It would, however, be easy to view the Brian Meehan of today as a man broken, his top weapon taken and thrust into the hand of another. He recently lost his leading filly Romantic Liason, the Queen Mary Stakes winner at Royal Ascot, to Godolphin.

She may have been born with only one eye, but that was mercifully just in her name, and the big girl would have been a player in next year's 1,000 Guineas.

This, though, would be to misunderstand the reality for the vast majority of British trainers, those who cannot afford to see racehorses through rose-tinted binoculars. Training is a lot more than a word of instruction in the paddock, the tightening of the girth and extraction of a cork from the throat of a champagne bottle.

And the bits you don't see are hardly the most glamourous. Making entries and checking the books are not natural territory for most trainers, but the paperwork has to be done.

However many times we see horses running free in their paddocks to orchestral music we must remind ourselves that horseracing, like football, is not actually either art or sport. It's business.

Trainers do not need reminding. "This is a business and the primary function of a trainer is to run it properly," Meehan says. "The big thing is to increase your quality and, whatever anyone says, the only way to do that is improve your budget.

"Quality comes at a price and there are only so many times you buy a pair of shoes that you throw away overnight before you realise you should buy a proper pair for £200 that last for years. It's all about turnover because the prizemoney is such a disgrace. That's why you don't cry when a horse like Romantic Liason goes. As long as we have got horses good enough to sell to Sheikh Mohammed and he wants to buy them then they will go."

This is a common story, even if Brian Meehan's is not. When an Irishman comes into racing it is usually as part of a family tree in the sport of sequoia proportions. He is the exception.

Meehan is from Limerick, though his was hardly an Angela's Ashes upbringing as the son of an orthopaedic surgeon. Indeed, he appeared set to embark on the medical profession himself when he left Roscrea, a Cistercian monastery in Tipperary. These days though, as he sits behind his desk with a Silk Cut almost a sixth digit on his hand, he does not appear very Benedictine at all.

Post Hannon, he started off with eight horses at Folly House stables in Lambourn, just another worker bee on racing's great honeycomb. That he has risen from there is confirmation that Meehan has learned another great modern lesson of the turf: that training two-year-olds proficiently is the way to start vaulting up the ladder.

The fates have usually been in his corner, as the man himself readily admits, but even outrageous good fortune cannot lift you from single figures to the 110 currently accommodated at Newlands.

"All you've got to do [to be a trainer] is get up in the morning and watch them canter," Meehan says. "Then you sit on the phone and smoke fags all day.

"Our success is mainly down to luck. Pure fluke. We got started with two-year-olds and they're still a very important element of the set-up here. If you get success there seems to be a certain momentum about it."

The impetus has brought him, Romantic Liason apart, Tomba, who secured the trainer's first Group One success when winning the Prix de la Foret at Longchamp in 1998, and Bad As I Wanna Be, who won the Prix Morny at the same level two years later.

The celebration party after the latter's victory started with a group of four in a small restaurant owned by a fisherman near Deauville, but in two hours had swelled to 20 or more guests. The seafood population in Normandy and the French grape community as a whole fear a repetition to this day.

And then there was the case for Sarava, the most expensive yearling Meehan has ever purchased at $250,000 [£162,000] in the United States, who was unplaced in three starts last season in Britain.

The Irishman's belief in the horse was, however, gloriously confirmed when Sarava was repatriated with Ken McPeek. He became, at 70-1, the biggest outsider to win in 134 runnings of the Belmont Stakes, the third leg of the American Triple Crown, in June.

"Okay, he didn't win over here," Meehan says, "but we did buy a top-class Classic winner. He's a very valuable commodity now."

Meehan may be grateful for the way that chance has favoured him, and it is not a friend he wants to lose touch with easily. He sees fortune continuing and, already, the eyes are out for another, even more substantial, yard. "We would look elsewhere to find somewhere a little bit bigger," he says. "We are always looking around for a suitable property."