Horse Racing: Greg Wood on the Derby's Critics

It is nearly a year since tens of thousands of racegoers streamed away from Epsom Downs convinced that they had seen a Derby winner to rank among the best of the last 40 years. Motivator, still unbeaten, had cantered all over his opponents from the off before swaggering away in the straight to win by five lengths. The Derby had clearly done its job, and pinpointed the best middle-distance three-year-old of his generation.

Four months and three defeats later, Motivator went off to stud without another victory to his name, the third Derby winner in a row to do so. Oratorio, who hated Epsom and finished well beaten, beat Motivator in the Eclipse and the Irish Champion Stakes, while Europe's official three-year-old champion was Hurricane Run, who ran second in the French Derby before winning the Irish equivalent.

Racing found itself robbed of a longed-for champion, and then looked around for someone or something to blame. The Derby, inevitably, seemed a promising candidate for some, since it grows ever more unique as a test of young thoroughbreds in an increasingly homogenised, all-weather racing world.

The standard complaint that it is an unreasonable challenge for fragile, inexperienced horses will never be extinguished until the Downs are flattened and Epsom installs a standard, American-style oval. But forewarned is forearmed, and as the racing world prepares for its annual day out in south-west London, it is time to stand up for the great race's reputation.

It has been around for well over 200 years, after all, so three straight winners who failed to win again barely even rates as a blip. And those who criticise the recent quality of Derby winners tend to forget that the three before that - High Chaparral, Galileo and Sinndar - were top-class colts, who all went on to win the Irish Derby, and then accumulated an Arc, a King George and two Breeders' Cup Turfs between them.

You do not need to go back any further than 20 years, meanwhile, to come across winners like Nashwan, Generous and Lammtarra, while the fact that John Magnier's Coolmore operation still has six potential runners shows the regard that the world's foremost breeding business still holds for the Epsom Classic.

Magnier, of course, knows what it is to stand inside the winners' circle after the Derby. Sheikh Mohammed, whose Godolphin operation will not have a runner this year, is still waiting a first Derby winner in his name, and the race's butterfly-like ability to flutter just out of reach of those who are most eager to grasp it is another part of its attraction.

It is the people's race, after all, the working-class answer to the snobbery of Royal Ascot later in June. A race for great jockeys too, like Piggott and, more recently, Kieren Fallon, who rides the track as if he has the gift of second sight.

It is all part of the Derby brew, and racing is so much the better for it. Because if the sport ever decides it has no place for a course like Epsom or a race like the Derby, that will be the day when it finally shudders and offers up its soul.