There is lot to be said about this philosophy when dealing with horses as Arjun Mangalorkar can testify. The horses under his care are obviously a very happy lot as the past nine months have been the most successful of his thirteen-year-old career as a trainer of horses.
      Since October last year Arjun has won derbies in Mysore, Kolkata and Delhi and with Aboline winning the Kingfisher Derby and Conceptual taking the Bangalore St. Leger, he is on a classic winning sequence rarely seen outside of the big racing stables.
      Talking to this writer a few days after winning the Kingfisher Derby, Arjun was clear that his success was due to the quality of horses he had in his stables.
      Without a good horse you can’t win the big races. A good horse makes a good trainer.      We get to train all kinds of horses but no matter what you do you can’t get a mediocre horse to perform miracles on the track, he said. He went on to add that the trainers job is about gauging a horses potential and getting it to perform to that level.
     Having plumbed the depths when he saw some of the best horses in his stable succumb to a mystery illness six years ago, Arjun is not getting carried away with his present run of success.
    Get the basics right and keep things simple even when things are not going your way is the credo by which he handles the stressful business of training racehorses. He underscores this point by noting that Conceptual was always regarded highly and would have been a major factor in the