STATISTICS can be made to mean whatever you want them to mean; it’s a little-known fact that 32.86% of people enjoy reading about statistics on a Saturday morning.

One school of thought considers that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Another reckons that statistics are like a bikini, what they reveal being suggestive, what they conceal being vital. Yet another will tell you that the unwary use statistics as a drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination.

The case of Brian Meehan satisfies all three viewpoints. Meehan has trained only four winners in 2024 with the year half gone, so he can’t be much of a trainer; that’s worse than a damned lie. Four winners in six months might suggest that he’s struggling, but that would conceal the truth. And anyone hoping for support in their view that Meehan has hit hard times is badly in need of the illumination that lit up Royal Ascot last month.

Meehan trained two winners from five runners at the Royal meeting, doubling his tally for the year, sending out Rashabar to win the Group 2 Coventry Stakes and Jayarebe to take the Group 3 Hampton Court Stakes. Other trainers won more races, other trainers won bigger races, but Meehan, 56, has been there and done that too and his Ascot pair are ample evidence of the hoary old cliche about form being temporary and class being permanent.

Don’t knock cliches; there’s a wealth of truth in them. Don’t, at the same time, recommend to Meehan - who may embellish his superlative record further when the filly Kathmandu bids for the Group 1 Prix Jean Prat at Deauville on Sunday - that his dynamic duo have brought an end to his perceived sojourn in the ‘where are they now?’ file. Regular Meehan-watchers will recognise the Limerick man’s occasional steely, gimlet-eyed gaze; it serves as the response to that angle.

In the limelight

“You could look at it like that, but that’s not the way I look at it,” he says. “If people want to think I’m back in the limelight now, okay, but from my perspective I’m just carrying on doing what I normally do.

“I train stakes winners every year. The horses have to be good enough, and the rest comes down to planning, hard work, and a great team alongside me.”

Then he pauses, considers the starkness of the statistic with which he has been confronted, and takes us on a deep dive through the realities of running his historic Manton yard, through the looking-glass that solely, stoically reflects the number of winners.

“Okay, four winners isn’t as many as I’d like, but let’s look at some other numbers. I’ve got 70 or 80 horses, and half of them are two-year-olds, so at the beginning of the year there’s only half a yard, say 40, to work with.

“Then as the months go by many of those 40 horses can be unavailable - they’re injured, or they leave the yard, or something else - and then you’re waiting for the two-year-olds to come through. By the end of the year, there’ll be more winners to look at. Yes, last year was disappointing [nine winners] but it wasn’t a good year for my three-year-olds. So this year I have very few older horses, and basically the whole yard is three-year-olds and two-year-olds.

“And I don’t care about strike rates. It’s all about winning quality races. I’ve won 15 Group 1s and about 75 other group races, and there’s no lack of ambition on my part to get those numbers higher - if I can get past 20 and 100 by the time I pack it in then I’ll be a happy man.”

Surgical strikes

No trainer - with the exception of Australian raider Henry Dwyer - made such a surgical strike on the assets of Royal Ascot as did Meehan. “Two very good days,” he says, the joy of it still in his voice. “I got an awful lot of pleasure from that.”

Surprise was the wider emotion when 80/1 chance Rashabar broke his maiden by a nose in the Coventry, but Meehan had not been entertaining an angel unawares.

“From day one he was quite special,” says Meehan of the Holy Roman Emperor colt. “Before he made his debut at Newbury he was unsure of himself, lacked self-confidence, but that introduction made a man of him, changed him psychologically. A couple of days later I could really see the difference in him.

“Then it all went wrong for him at Chester, as it can do, and I was thinking that I couldn’t send him to Ascot as a maiden. But Sean [Levey] said that for a young horse running at Chester was like having two runs, so we stuck to the Ascot plan. The Sangster family [who run the ownership syndicate] reckoned he could finish in the first five, and if it all fell right he might do even better.”

It all fell right, and a higher draw might well have emphasised the colt’s superiority. Meehan didn’t bite at the 80/1 - “I’m not a great gambler, I’m shocking really” - but the owners and Manton staff were not so cautious, taking full financial advantage.

For many observers the most obvious significance of the victory was to witness the old, revered green and blue Robert Sangster silks back in the winner’s enclosure at Royal Ascot, an event that was not lost even on teenage jockey sensation Billy Loughnane, born two years after Sangster’s death.

“It’s great to see those colours still going,” says Meehan. “Billy was so emotional about his first Royal Ascot winner coming in those famous silks.

“Sam Sangster [Robert’s son] is a very big part of what we do at Manton. We collaborate on everything, especially buying at the sales. We split the catalogue and not much gets past us, although of course you can’t buy them all. To have a Coventry winner in those colours, with Sam’s deep involvement, felt incredible.”

Two days later, Jayarebe had a more obvious chance in the Hampton Court, and here too was a connection to past glories, the three-year-old carrying the orange and white colours of Iraj Parvizi, who also owned Meehan’s second Breeders’ Cup Turf winner Dangerous Midge (2010).

“He jumped out well, switched off and hit the line strong,” says Meehan.

“Iraj is a very loyal owner, he’s had a lot of luck and we’ve both had a lot of fun. I’ll tell him what I want to do with his horses, he’ll question me about the reasons, and then he’ll tell me to do what I want to do.”

Quality mounts

Training racehorses is the only thing Meehan has ever wanted to do. There were always horses around at home in Limerick, a better-quality mount just a bicycle ride away at the late Andrew McNamara’s yard, and Meehan recalls with a wry smile the futility of his schoolday career guidance week - “Why am I here? I know exactly what I want to do.”

Three years at the Irish National Stud, remembered for the fun as much as the education, preceded a one-way ticket across the Irish Sea to the sprawling Wiltshire empire ruled by Richard Hannon senior, where a young man could absorb not just the art of training horses but the ways of the world.

“Old Mr Hannon had the lot, a real all-rounder,” says Meehan. “He was a horseman, a stockman, a great planner, tremendous with owners, and he grew a business from nothing that continues to thrive under his son Richard - see how well he did at Royal Ascot.”

Meehan soaked it all up for five years and then struck out on his own in Lambourn, where he spent 14 years with increasing success before making - what is liable to be his final move - the short distance along the A4 to Manton, the vast rural training complex where he eventually bought his own piece of the action. There are almost as many ways of training racehorses as there are racehorses, and Meehan has found what suits him.

“I went through a time in Lambourn when I had 200 horses, and I probably didn’t enjoy that so much,” he says. “Now I have 70, 80 horses, and it’s better like that.

“I could get to know Rashabar, see what he needed to develop, see what he needs to develop further, and you don’t always have the opportunity to do that with 200 horses. Some guys can handle it, and they’re brilliant at it, but it isn’t for me.

“Life’s about doing what you do best, what you enjoy. And this size of yard is what I’m best at, what I enjoy.”

Following footsteps

His son Frank also had little need for career guidance week - although he still went the conventional route through university - and is currently learning more about the racing game with Brendan Walsh in Kentucky. Frank is the same age as his father was when he took out a licence and Meehan is happy for him to follow in his footsteps, with one significant caveat.

“I’d like him to wait a few years,” he says. “It’s important not to start too soon. Racing is like the priesthood, like marriage, when you’re in, you’re in and that’s that.

“You enjoy your life before becoming a trainer and still continue to enjoy it as a trainer, but in a different way. It’s all-consuming. Frank is very keen but he doesn’t need to be in too much of a hurry.”

That wise paternal advice takes on extra resonance when set against the problematic backdrop of British racing, which appears almost ungovernable and is beset by fundamental financial problems, dwindling betting turnover and falling attendance. The glitter and glamour of Royal Ascot is a good disguise but Meehan knows what’s behind the curtain.

“What racing in Britain needs is a strong leader, a benign dictator to take it by the scruff of the neck and shake it up,” he says.

“There is too much racing, probably too many racecourses, and far too many people and groups with different agendas who will never agree on anything. The BHA is more about organisation than governing, it doesn’t own enough of the industry.

“There are parallels with Formula 1 . . . that has, if you like, in a different format, stables, trainers, jockeys, owners, and it’s all about winning. And it became what it is now under Bernie Ecclestone - a strong dictator figure.

“Every jurisdiction has issues, I know, but some more than others, and I think British racing needs a Bernie-figure to shake it up.”

Broad spectrum

Meehan has always worked on a broad canvas, winning Group/Grade 1s in the US with Red Rocks and Dangerous Midge, in Dubai with David Junior, in France with Tomba, Arcano and Bad As I Wanna Be as well as on the home front, and his inevitably disparaging comment about British prize money goes a long way to informing the summer targets for his stable stars.

Deauville is the draw, the destination, with Rashabar on course for the Group 1 Prix Morny in August, Jayarebe being pointed towards the richly endowed Group 2 Prix Guillaume d’Ornano, and the aforementioned Kathmandu - who in May came within inches of a Group 1 score when beaten a head in the Poule d’Essai des Pouliches at Longchamp - in the Jean Prat.

“The Morny is a bucket-list race, it makes stallions, and although Rashabar is not French-bred he was bought in France and qualifies for valuable premiums,” says Meehan.

“Long-term I’m thinking of the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf at Del Mar, I have no doubts about his stamina. Jayarebe is a French-bred so the added premiums in the Ornano make it a very lucrative target. Later on, the Breeders’ Cup Turf could be an option for him.”

It’s a long time since Meehan last won at the top level - Most Improved, in the 2012 St James’s Palace Stakes - and his drive, his ambition, his desire to end the dozen years in the Group 1 wilderness, and perhaps one day to finally scratch that hard-to-reach itch of classic glory, is as strong as ever.

“I train at a wonderful yard, I’ve got some great owners, some very nice horses, and I’m winning big races with them with hopefully more to come,” he says. “At the moment, I’m really happy with the way it’s going.”

It’s always been the quality that counts for Meehan, not the quantity. His goal in life embraces something unquantifiable by bare statistics, something that lies beyond the restless rat-race of the horse racing world, a man doing what he wants to do, the way he wants to do it.