'It was a terrible moment' - the holy grail that has brought 23 years of hurt

It was in 2006 that the Japanese 'obsession' with winning the Arc really took to the skies. There had been glorious failure already, notably when El Condor Pasa was narrowly denied by Montjeu in 1999, but the arrival of Deep Impact in Paris engendered frantic excitement, the product of a frustration which had fed and grown the ambition of a fast-growing racing nation.

The colt's followers turned up at Longchamp in their thousands and made the place their own, in a fashion that even the regular British and Irish hordes had never matched. United in their adoration of the previous year's Triple Crown winner, the tourists gathered in massed ranks, polite and respectful but nonetheless fervent.

Their presence en masse quickly began to skew the local PMU odds. The talk was that they were all 'buying' small-stakes tote tickets as souvenirs, rather than as bets, to the extent that Deep Impact soared at one stage to a ludicrous 1-10 and his rivals took a long walk in the market. In the press room, greedy hacks fell over themselves to take advantage of the imbalance, scarce able to believe their luck, while the representatives of any British firms offering PMU prices put on their hard hats and took cover.