John Gosden: 'We were young and if you couldn't have fun in LA in the 1980s you couldn't have fun anywhere - it was a wild town'

After 19 seasons of scarcely wavering excellence at Clarehaven Stables, John Gosden, at the age of 73, has the cast and bearing of a racing institution. Born into a racing family and now the senior party in his own father-son training partnership, he might easily be mistaken for a man who has spent his whole life in one place, laying the foundations of a monolithic presence at racing's headquarters.

Newmarket, however, has been just one of many ports of call for this questing figure, whose voyages of discovery, while seeming with hindsight to have led inexorably to this exalted present moment, at the time must have appeared far more like youthful adventures that might have taken him anywhere.

"I wouldn't have wanted to stay in one place forever," he says with pleasing understatement, as we retrace a course that led him from childhood days soaking up the experience of his father, John 'Towser' Gosden, in the former training centre of Lewes, Sussex, to Cambridge University, South America, Ireland, the US, Wiltshire and, perhaps inevitably, his present base on Newmarket's Bury Road.