AIDAN O'BRIEN'S STABLES OPEN DAY:AIDAN O'BRIEN possesses a verbal tic that illustrates just how singular a talent the champion trainer has – "do you understand?"

His conversation is littered with inquiries about whether you are twigging what he is saying. It couldn’t be further away from any arrogant presumption that his audience might be too challenged to get it. Rather it is a genuine concern that he might not be getting across what he wants to express.

A couple of years ago after a controversial and abortive attempt to win the Melbourne Cup, O’Brien’s penchant for “do you understand?” rather got up the noses of the Flemington stewards at a post-race inquiry.

Instead of a piece of verbal punctuation, an alien racing culture took it as a challenge, which is about as far from what Ireland’s champion trainer is about as is possible to get.

The reality is that what O’Brien understands about horses is damn near unique, unfathomable to most anyone else. No wonder then so much of his time is spent wondering if everyone else is on the same page as him.

Mind you, faced with a phalanx of reporters invited into the world’s most famous stables at the behest of the Epsom Derby sponsors, Investec, the energy O’Brien expended towards our cognitive requirements might have been more productively steered elsewhere.

But closing in on his 15th year at the helm of Ballydoyle, O’Brien remains the same quiet, resolutely down-to-earth character he has always been, traits that on his home ground are combined with a wry sense of humour.

Today the newly-imported Australian speedball Starspangledbanner has his first start for the Coolmore team in the Duke Of York Stakes. O’Brien is still getting to know the chestnut colt but he has already established that Starspangledbanner is fast, very fast.

“In fact, I’ve told Johnny (Murtagh) he’s going to need a neck brace and a parachute!” the trainer grinned.

Cabaret will try and earn a place in next month’s Oaks in this afternoon’s Musidora, while tomorrow Cape Blanco puts his Derby credentials on the line in the Dante Stakes. And for the next three and a half weeks, it is Epsom in particular that will be exercising the minds of the Ballydoyle brains trust more than anything else.

The Irish Classics will begin at the Curragh the weekend after this but it is around the Derby that the history of Ballydoyle, and maybe even racing itself, is built.

“The Derby is the ultimate test of the horse, like no other race in the world,” O’Brien said with the sort of fervour that ruled out any suspicions he was merely blowing smoke for the sponsors.

“You’ve got to be able to turn left, turn right, go quick and slow, handle the preliminaries, handle the uphill and the downhill, stay the trip, then cope with the camber, quicken up and then fight at the end. A horse has to be exceptional to get through it,” he added.

It is eight years since High Chaparral and Galileo completed Derby victories that led some of us to presume even Vincent O’Brien’s Epsom tally of six victories might be under threat very much sooner rather than later.

Instead there has been nothing but frustration since, with three second placings and defeats for subsequent champions like Dylan Thomas and Soldier Of Fortune. Last year it would have been a first-four wipeout for Ballydoyle had it not been for a certain Sea The Stars.

“It hurts, all right. We’ve won it twice but we’ve been on the other side of the ditch too with so many placed horses. That’s why you need so much to go right – do you understand?” he asked.

What O’Brien has clearly learned to understand over the years is the value of patience, a good thing so far this year because quite a lot of what was expected to go right has gone badly wrong.

None more so than in the 2,000 Guineas less than two weeks ago, when St Nicholas Abbey’s entrance to the Classic stage turned from a hugely-anticipated tour-de-force into something of an embarrassed exit-left shuffle.

For a champion juvenile with a middle-distance pedigree that O’Brien now admits was putting in times superior to any of his five previous Guineas winners on the run-up to Newmarket, it all seemed dreadfully anti-climactic.

There was an immediate reaction in some quarters to start looking for an alternative Derby candidate on the Ballydoyle rota, maybe Jan Vermeer, or Cape Blanco or even Midas Touch, who won at Leopardstown on Sunday.

But there remains no doubt at Ballydoyle that St Nicholas Abbey remains the number one candidate, a colt of remarkable potential whose Guineas defeat O’Brien puts down to circumstances. As for the proposition that the real top-notchers find a way to win even when things don’t go their way, O’Brien is quick to dismiss it.

“If you’ve ever ridden, then you know that if you get a bump like the one St Nicholas Abbey got from Frankie’s horse (Al Zir) after 50 yards at Newmarket, it is like if you’re running yourself and you get a few nudges, then you lose concentration. They are only flesh and blood,” he said.

In St Nicholas Abbey’s case there were times during the spring when maybe that was forgotten in a blizzard of sectionally timed work-outs that provoked all that chatter about the son of Montjeu being a new Sea The Stars, maybe even the best colt ever to go through O’Brien’s hands.

“Information can be dangerous sometimes. He was putting in times faster than the top milers we have had here and he was doing it easy, without effort,” O’Brien considered.

“If we didn’t have all those times on the gallops then maybe we would have gone the traditional Derby route, in the trials instead of running in the Guineas.”

Instead it has been St Nicholas Abbey’s stable companions who have been sent down the trial route and those who under-estimate the likes of Jan Vermeer and Midas Touch do so at their peril, according to Johnny Murtagh.

Ballydoyle’s number one jockey believes there are up to five tip-top three-year-old prospects for this year and played down any fears about what has been a relatively lacklustre beginning to the season by O’Brien’s horses.

“The horses are not unfit. They are fit. But it is taking a race before they mentally click in,” he says.

St Nicholas Abbey has had that race now and any suspicion that natural talent might have contributed to him being slightly under-cooked at Newmarket won’t be a factor on the run-up to the Epsom Derby.

“All along we have felt that the ability has been there. All we have had to do is not mess him up,” O’Brien said.

“We have messed him up once. I just hope we won’t mess him up again. If we can get him to Epsom in good shape, then we’ll be really excited.”

And that’s an excitement the rest of us can totally understand.