Racing enjoys its proverbs. A good big 'un will always beat a good little 'un; Always back the outsider of three; the bigger the field the bigger the certainty. In National Hunt terms, however, the most common given is: They never come back.

Tomorrow the most popular Irish racehorse of the last decade tries yet again to give this racing cliche a kick in the teeth.

Danoli is now a veteran of 12, he hasn't had a race in 16 months, in his pomp he had an injury that stopped him from racing for eight months and, more seriously, threatened his career. There are those who will tell you Danoli should be doing the equine equivalent of putting on his slippers. Serious leg injuries in jump racing are as common as Christmas rows but much more difficult to fix. Yet Danoli's trainer, Tom Foley, has no qualms about bringing his star back from a series of problems that would have put many other horses in a retirement home, or worse.

"It all depends on the horse," Foley replies when the "they never come back" theory is put to him. "With the likes of Danoli, definitely, because he has the heart and the will to do it again."

But what if the general public's most favoured animal hurts himself again on the racetrack? He came back after winning the 1995 Aintree Hurdle on three effective legs, but is this tempting fate?

"The public knows what to expect. We always put the horse first. He will not be put through anything he doesn't want to do. But the enthusiasm is still there. We took him to Leopardstown on Champion Hurdle day and he was like a two-year-old. I'll be amazed if he doesn't go out there on Sunday as proud as punch," Foley reasons.

And reason is because Danoli has proved throughout his career to be an exceptional athlete, and he and Foley have provided an exceptional story.

The norm has rarely applied to either since they burst onto racing's firmament in the mid-1990s. Danoli, a 50 to 1 chance after all, probably won't win on Sunday, but afterwards who knows. It's happened before.

"Look at Aldaniti. His two front legs were gone and yet he went on to win the National," argues Des Leadon, the head of clinical pathology at the Irish Equine Centre in Kildare. Leadon is proof that a lifetime of dealing with animals on a scientific basis doesn't automatically rule out sentiment and understanding of the individual. "Leg and tendon injuries come under a very broad net, and generalisations are dangerous because they can lead to erroneous assumptions," Leadon says. "It's as true of horses as of humans that there are huge variations in tolerance of pain. One horse can be holding his leg up and more or less saying `ouch' while another is off cantering around a field.

"We can generalise for the majority, but Danoli is clearly an exceptionally brave horse," Leadon adds.

Foley and Danoli don't have to look back all the way to Aldaniti to find assurance that this latest return is not flailing at windmills. All Danoli has to do at tomorrow's start is look at the horse next to him.

In November 1994, a rangy youngster called Buck Rogers ran in his first steeplechase. It was a Graded race at Punchestown and yet he won easily. Ten lengths behind him was Strong Platinum, who went on to be a Grade One performer, and nine lengths further back was another youngster rejoicing under the name of Imperial Call.

A year-and-a-half later Imperial Call was in the Cheltenham winners' enclosure after a brilliant run in the Gold Cup, and Buck Rogers, unraced since Punchestown because of horrendous leg problems, was in danger of being put down.

The saga of the four years Buck Rogers was laid off with injury is almost epic, as is his form this season which has seen him win the Durkan Chase, the Leopardstown Chase and enters tomorrow's Hennessy with a perfectly reasonable chance. But his trainer, Victor Bowens, would not be human if he didn't consider what might have been.

"It's such a shame. Obviously as a six, seven or eight-year-old he had Gold Cup written all over him. We're all aware that Imperial Call went on to win the Gold Cup and as a five-year-old Buck Rogers made Imperial Call look ordinary," Bowens considers.

Instead of Gold Cup glory, Bowens became familiar with the frustration that injured steeplechasers will always provide to trainers.

"He should have been dead and gone, and the professional opinion at the time was to put him down. He had been blistered and pin-fired and his career was over. It took all of three years to get him right, but when a horse breaks down and then comes back, they can often appear cowardly because they still have the memory of pain," says Bowens.

Buck Rogers has proved another exception to that rule. Foley, too, sees no point in lumping every horse into one bracket.

"Some horses can be a bit cowardly, but it's the same in humans. You take a good footballer who has broken a leg, often he won't be the same when he's going for a 50-50 ball. It depends on the individual," says Foley.

Courage has never been an issue with Danoli. That Aintree Hurdle success proved that. As did his return from that injury when he almost sent Leopards town into apoplexy by running the subsequent Champion Hurdler Collier Bay so close at Leopardstown. On that occasion he may have been even too brave.

"He probably took too much out of himself then. If you know this horse you know he will always keep going to the finish. He showed that at Liverpool when he was badly hurt but gave no sign of it," Foley says, before admitting that time may now be his greatest enemy.

"I suppose it is hard to see him come back as good as he was, and we possibly missed the best years of his career because of injury. He was good, but I sometimes think we missed the absolute best of him," he says.

So maybe time and its passage is what we should wax eloquent about tomorrow. Because some crocks can indeed come back. If you doubt that, just look at Danoli and Buck Rogers tomorrow and marvel at their courage.