The jockeys in the Derby wore black armbands and the Epsom flags flew at half-mast but the truest memorialising of Vincent O’Brien on the Downs yesterday was done by the great race itself. It is amid the pounding hooves and the rainbow silks and the roaring of the crowd on the Turf’s biggest days that the images of a miraculous career will always be freshest in the mind.

Vincent’s genius was often manifested in quiet settings, in the chill of an Irish morning as he watched a string of thoroughbreds at exercise and read volumes of meaning in how they moved, or in a barn separated from the hubbub of the sales ring when he stared for interminable minutes at a yearling until his seer’s eye let him picture in detail the racehorse the gawky creature would become. But ultimately the only proving ground for a trainer is the track and it was on occasions like yesterday’s that the shy, mildly spoken Cork man who died at 92 last week showed himself to be the most inspired practitioner of his craft centuries of organised racing have produced.

My own reaction to his feats, and to sporadic meetings over the years that involved long one-to-one conversations, was a sense of awe made no less lasting by the ease his modesty and friendliness engendered in his company. As has been previously recorded in this space, those encounters left me with the exhilarating, slightly eerie realisation that I had been talking to somebody who was probably better at the job he did than anyone else who ever lived.

The statistics of his record, and the litany of the horses he raised to extraordinary levels in the making of it, have been scattered through scores of obituaries but the incredulity they evoke never diminishes. And nothing strains believability more than the reach and versatility of talents that first established an unprecedented and unrepeatable hegemony over the world of National Hunt racing and then concentrated on the Flat with scarcely less astonishing results. The most authoritative judges have recognised him as the supreme master of training under both codes. If he had retired before he was 40, the jumpers would already have made his fame in racing imperishable. Between 1953 and 1955 he completed a hat-trick of Grand National victories with three different horses, having earlier (1948-50) sent out Cottage Rake to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup three years in a row. In 1949 and 1950 O’Brien did the Champion Hurdle-Gold Cup double, thanks to Hatton’s Grace, who accomplished his own treble by winning the Champion Hurdle again in 1951.

There was a plethora of further Cheltenham successes, notably with Knock Hard in the Gold Cup of 1953, but by then the training base had been transferred from County Cork to Ballydoyle in County Tipperary, and it was there that the focus of O’Brien’s ambitions began to change. Few expected him to be a failure in the wider arena of the Flat but nobody could possibly foresee the historic impact he would have. Chamier, in the Irish Derby of 1953, was the first of 27 winners he saddled in the Classic races of his homeland. His equivalent total in the English Classics was 16 and six of those were in the Derby. He was a relentless plunderer at Royal Ascot and at the same course’s other principal meeting he won the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes three times. Ballymoss, his initial King George hero in 1958, stormed through the Longchamp mud later that year to win the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe and there was more glory in Europe’s greatest race two decades on when Alleged succeeded in consecutive seasons. The French also surrendered their Derby to an invader from Ballydoyle in 1983 and the Americans were given proof of the longevity of O’Brien’s gifts when the wonder stirred in them by Sir Ivor’s devastating surge in the Washington DC International Stakes of 1968 was revived by Royal Academy’s victory in the Breeders’ Cup Mile of 1990.

That Lester Piggott rode Sir Ivor was natural (the colt had already provided the first of the four Derby triumphs gained by the most formidable trainer-jockey combination in the modern annals of racing) but he was just nine days short of his 55th birthday, and recently emerged from an admittedly unconvincing retirement, when he was swung up on Royal Academy at Belmont Park. O’Brien encouraged the comeback, in spite of having severed the professional alliance with Piggott years before, not least because of the clear impression that the incomparable rider’s handling of the stable’s horses on the gallops was doing more to tell him what his future booking arrangements should be than to enlighten the trainer. By the time I was having dinner at Ballydoyle with Vincent and his wife Jacqueline in 1993, the reconnection with Lester was sufficiently strong to include exercise assignments. “But I only let him ride slow work,” said O’Brien with a smile.

On the same evening, Jacqueline pointed out that though Vincent could identify horses as individuals even when they were “little more than dots on the horizon”, he frequently wasn’t aware of their markings. “An animal might have two white feet and he wouldn’t have noticed,” she said. Her husband saw no contradiction in that: “If you look at me, you know me without checking off my features and my colouring. You just know me. That’s how I am with horses. It’s not strange.” Not so much strange as uncanny, like so much about the depth of his affinity with thoroughbreds. As JP McManus said to a couple of us in Newbridge, Kildare, on Thursday, at the moving funeral that bade a perfect farewell to the nonpareil of trainers, “Vincent may have taught a lot of people all they know about the game, but he didn’t teach them all he knew.” That might have been asking the impossible.

The monument he created for himself extends far beyond the towering accomplishments on the racecourse. He was a visionary innovator and much that is now considered standard in racing stables, whether in relation to methods or facilities, is traceable to his pioneering boldness. Even more fundamentally, he had a massive effect on the bloodlines that govern the production of racehorses in Europe. It began when he rejected a Ribot colt he had gone to inspect at a Canadian stud and instead homed in on the merits of Nijinsky, whose winning of the English Triple Crown launched his sire, Northern Dancer, towards recognition as the most prepotent, influential and commercial stallion of the late 20th century. O’Brien’s commitment to the Northern Dancer stock was crucial to the development of the Coolmore studs masterminded by his son-in-law, John Magnier, into the preeminent breeding operation in the world.

Vincent O’Brien’s appearance and demeanour often reminded me of a small, dignified country doctor. In the matter of making champions of the Turf, he had an unrivalled genius for diagnosis and prescription.

Why I see the star in Kinane

As Sea The Stars lengthened his huge and fluent stride to power untroubled to a memorably impressive victory in the Investec Derby at Epsom yesterday, he made a sight too noble to be tainted by thoughts of financial gain. But, if the shouts with which I urged him home were essentially expressions of appreciation of equine aristocracy, it has to be admitted that they may have drawn a little extra intensity from awareness of how much his demonstration of extreme class would be depositing in the biscuit tin.

In the approach to the great event, it had seemed politic to defy the omens of history and heed the counsel of the wise, and when the need is for assessment of what it takes to win major horse races there are few sources of wisdom more reliable than Michael Kinane. So resisting all the talk about the shortage of stamina Sea The Stars must have inherited from his sire, Cape Cross, and all the reminders that it was 20 years since a Guineas winner (Nashwan) had gone on to dominate the Derby, was made relatively easy by the steady thrum of the outstanding jockey’s confidence. He felt privileged, a couple of weeks before his 50th birthday, to be allied with a truly special thoroughbred whose talents could only be enhanced by the skills of a superb trainer, John Oxx.