Racing is all about opinions but it is also about memories. So this list is not an attempt to rank the great and good of the sport - human and equine - in any order of merit. Rather, it is aimed to reflect what they mean in my estimation.

I came at racing from an obscure angle, relatively late in a sports-consumed life previously dominated by cricket. It was the late 1970s before I took much interest, hence the exclusion of some names that others may regard as sacrilegious omissions.

Apart from a handful that made a lifelong impression (Vincent O’Brien, Arkle), those included here are people I have met and horses I have watched. And, in one case, a racecourse I have cherished.

Probably no one will agree with my order. That is the nature of such an exercise. But the object is to provoke the kind of memories and debates that are such a compelling part of this sport.

50 - Kieren Fallon

Should be higher, and would be but for the unignorable baggage of notoriety, but has to be included as a genuine hero to so many ordinary punters who cheerfully forgive his every self-destructive idiocy for just one of those compelling finishes he still rides better than any man alive.

Razor racing brain, icy in the saddle, he is so surprisingly diverting away from racing that he is hard to dislike. May yet return in glory one more time after his latest folly of a drugs ban.

49 - Ben de Haan

Shy, self-effacing boy-next-door type, a lifer in the Lambourn area, he gets in for just one ride - and it’s not his 1983 Grand National win on Corbiere. Two years later, De Haan won a humble maiden chase at Newton Abbot on a mare called Sportswords. My mare. My first winner as an owner.

Anyone who has had the feeling will appreciate that the jockey is a hero forever. Sportswords never featured again and De Haan’s training career has been similarly disappointing.

48 - Cartmel racecourse

Nobody told me I couldn’t include a venue and this is a properly heroic place, a throwback to innocent times when village life meant so much more. The survival, since 1856, of a postage-stamp racecourse, wedged onto former Priory land in a tiny tourist village served only by farm-track roads, is a modern sporting miracle. And still this wondrous place draws crowds that make Newmarket drool with envy. Long may it flourish.