There have been quite a few pleasant spin-offs for Deborah O’Brien through Bradsell’s emergence as a top-class sprinter, from consecutive nominations for the Langham Cup as small breeder of the year at the TBA Flat Awards to smart lunches acknowledging those behind the winners of races at Royal Ascot.

Perhaps the best of all came at the York Ebor meeting, where the Tasleet colt would claim his second Group 1 win with a professional display in the Coolmore Wootton Bassett Nunthorpe Stakes.

“Oliver St Lawrence [racing manager of owner Shaikh Nasser’s Victorious Racing] very kindly asked us to come and join in the preliminaries and the celebrations after it,” explains O’Brien, who lives with her husband Michael near Knaresborough.

“For it to be our local course, and for him to win the Nunthorpe, it was just an amazing day. I actually got to put my hands on him for the first time since he’d been sold as a yearling which again, as a breeder, is quite a special thing.”

O’Brien has been breeding from the same family which produced Bradsell since the mid-90s and had owned a share in his fourth dam, Champenoise, a Forzando mare who won a seller at Yarmouth. Having enjoyed her as a racehorse, O’Brien bought her for a very small sum when she was retired owing to an injury.

She has raced some of the fillies, usually under the banner of Lovely Bubbly Racing, and Bradsell’s dam, Russian Punch, won the Listed Radley Stakes at Newbury.

Bradsell, Russian Punch’s fourth foal, sold for 12,000gns at the Tattersalls Somerville Sale before reaching Archie Watson’s stable via the Goffs UK Breeze-Up.

“His Coventry win was astonishing, then he got injured at the Curragh in the Phoenix Stakes and that finished the season,” she recalls.

“I think when he came back he was too keen at six furlongs so to have the courage to supplement him for the King’s Stand at Ascot and go and win that, I didn’t really know quite where to put myself, it was so exciting!

“What a courageous horse and hats off to the connections through the journey, I just hope they have a clear run with him now.”

The O’Briens met when they were both tax inspectors at the Inland Revenue. They now have seven mares, from several main families, boarding at Bearstone Stud in Shropshire.

“I was a maths graduate, so patterns and pedigrees appeal to me somehow,” she says.

“I love the planning of the mating, the matching the pedigrees within the budget I can afford and getting the right mix. That’s where my passion lies really.

“I’ve refined a lot of it and got better; seeing how other people have done it continues to interest me greatly.

“You learn every time, every year, but knowing your own families and trying to develop them generation after generation appeals as well.”

For all that Bradsell was not much of a success in the ring for his breeder, she had a better result not long after the Coventry victory when his younger half-brother by Ulysses, Tribal Rhythm, made £150,000 at Doncaster.

Looking to the next generation from Russian Punch, O’Brien adds: “I’ve tried to replicate the mating with Tasleet as closely as possible so she’s in foal to Soldier’s Call and I’ve got a fantastic Oasis Dream filly from the mare this year.

“She’s not a big mare and Oasis Dream was the right size and height for her.”

O’Brien is retired from the tax world and manages her stock with equal rigour. She breeds only from winners and sells colts to keep the business going, but had been desperate for another filly.

“She was conceived on Valentine’s Day and born on our ruby wedding anniversary, so she’s already named Ruby Punch!” she laughs.

“She’s going nowhere, except the racecourse, because I’m keeping her. She even has a sort of heart-shaped mark on her head, so she’s obviously meant to be.”

O’Brien will have to wait and see whether she has another chance to give Bradsell a congratulatory pat on the racecourse but this modest individual is particularly grateful for what he has achieved already.

“He’s taken me to places that I’d never imagined as a breeder,” she says. “You’re always hope you’d do something which is successful but he’s been a bolt from the blue, and opened up a remarkable social life in consequence!”