Julie Camacho is sanguine about the chance that her 27th season with a trainer’s licence will come anywhere close to her 26th. “We won’t be able to follow that, unfortunately,” she said this week, before the start of the new Flat campaign on turf at Doncaster on Saturday. “You probably don’t enjoy it as much as you should do at the time, because you’re always on to the next thing, you’ve got more runners coming up and you’re keeping going on the hamster wheel. But now we’ve had a bit of time to reflect, it was definitely a year we’ll never forget.”
Camacho’s realism is understandable, given the wild swings in fortune that are a standard feature of most trainers’ careers. That said, though, she might conceivably have said much the same 12 months ago, with her season for the ages still in front of her.
