'THE reason I ran the horse was that there was €5,000 prize-money right down to sixth place. We'll surely come in the first six, I thought. If we get fifth we'll get more; if we get fourth we'll get more again, and so on. We were there to win, of course, but the money certainly swayed us towards running him."

The trouble was Bahrain Storm ended up winning the Galway Hurdle. Pat Flynn was bullish that the six-year-old would run creditably, but even he was taken aback by the gelding's six-length hammering of the heavily-backed favourite, Deutschland. And there were a further five and a half lengths back to third.

This was all on ground softer than ideal for the Bahhare-bred, which took a long time to win on the level and was initially allotted a hurdle rating of 97. By the time he had left his foes floundering in the Hurdle under young Stephen Gray, he had already been declared to run on the Flat the very next night. As if those who doubted the horse's toughness needed another reminder of how wrong they had been, he bolted up in that as well.

"He was never tricky," Flynn stresses. "Bahrain Storm is so laid-back, it's unreal. He's lazy, real lazy. If he hasn't blinkers on, he won't bother his head."

For many, the sight of the horse quickening away up the hill for the second time on the Friday was the defining moment of the 2009 Galway Races. Flynn is an extremely popular figure in the sport. "I couldn't believe the pouring out of congratulations -- the texts, the cards and so on. I was uplifted. People came out of the woodwork that I hadn't known for 20 years. People shook my hand; they were genuinely happy."

The 52-year-old is widely viewed as one of the most capable trainers in Ireland. He started off in the early 1980s with a mare owned by his mother, which won. His very next inmate was a two-year-old named Virginia Deer, which won four races that season, including a Group Three. It was an astoundingly good start for the farmer turned trainer in Carrick-on-Suir.

His ascension was more gradual than dramatic in the '80s, by the end of which he had earned a reputation for being adept at placing his horses astutely. Twenty years on and Flynn stresses the relevance of this just as much as he would have back then.

It governed his decision to resaddle Bahrain Storm a day after he had won the Hurdle. "Some people don't realise the rating system in horses. He was rated 98 on the Flat and he was carrying level weights with horses rated in their 80s. I said: 'Jesus, I have to run here'. I'm always into handicapping horses and watching that.

"I didn't want to run him two days in a row but an opportunity like this wasn't going to come around for a long time and I wasn't going to miss it. I took a risk, because if he slipped up, people would be saying I should never have run. The purists would know why I ran him."

Flynn is also an undoubted horseman. He chose Gray to ride Bahrain Storm in the Hurdle race because of the Dundalk man's "kind hands", which the trainer himself would demonstrate by his treatment of the gelding between his two wins.

It seems remarkable and illogical in equal measure that he deemed it wise to have the horse driven back to Waterford on the Thursday, only to load him up in the lorry to return to Galway the very next morning. Flynn saw it differently: he was thinking outside the box, by wanting Bahrain Storm inside the box.

"By the Friday, he'd actually travelled 250 miles, as well as running in the race the day before. I was going to leave him there, but I said: 'look, we'll bring him home'. He was home at 9.20 that night and had a lovely 14 hours in his box. If I'd left him in Galway, he'd have been wondering where he was and he wouldn't have rested as well. He'd have been uneasy. We were able to give him everything he wanted at home -- in his own box, where he felt safe in himself."

Flynn describes the gelding, owned by Pat Sweeney, as "like a pet lamb". He nurtures the talents of his horses -- as do his staff which he so persistently praises -- with patience and empathy. Why else did Bahrain Storm win nine times after failing to do so in his first 14 outings? She's Our Mark ("a phenomenon" in her trainer's words) was once a modest 69-rated handicapper; now she is a five-time winner, the last of them a Group race at Leopardstown just over a fortnight ago.

The late MV O'Brien is accepted as the greatest trainer of them all, yet to complement his innate horsemanship, he was always looking to learn and be innovative. Flynn, likewise, pursues the crucial edge that will allow his list of winners to lengthen further.

That is why he gave Bahrain Storm a spin over fences for the first time in Limerick in May. "The main reason for this was I had the Galway Hurdle in mind. I knew they were going to be using these new 'easyfix' hurdles in Galway.

"I thought if he runs over fences, he'll have no problem over these new hurdles -- he'll make little of them. They look like baby fences. I was afraid that if he hadn't run over fences, he might try to brush through those hurdles. He was like a gazelle at the second-last."

Though his profession has taken him on a journey nearing three decades, he is as excited by it now as he was when he saddled his first horse. In order for that to be so, he must continue to experiment and endeavour to do things that bit better.

"I went off last year to Iowa in the States and bought a humongous Veda hay-drying machine. Now I have it here and we save our own hay with gas. We can save 24 big round bales at a time. Most trainers import their hay from Canada or France; I make up my own hay here. And it tests perfectly. I'm making hay for years, having been a farmer, but I'm increasingly frustrated with the Irish weather conditions. If you can get a window to save the hay, it's usually when the hay is either not ready or too ready.

"I had to do something so I looked around and eventually I came across this. No other trainer, I think, has followed my lead; they're fairly expensive I suppose.

With the Irish hay, you don't get that extra day to save it. Once heat gets into the hay, the damage is done and once you feed it to your horses, their lungs get infected."

Flynn interprets Bahrain Storm's victory as a clear vindication of his decision to import the hay-maker, and he revels in relating how that was not the only new gadget at Ballingara Stables this year.

"We've gone a step further now and got this new thing in from Australia. It's a blanket for the horse's back. We've magnets in the blankets and we have it wired up to the jockeys. We've a satellite tracking system and we can measure the heart-rates of the horses on the gallops. We can then input that into the computer and we can see how hard our horse worked or didn't work.

"We have it about a month and Bahrain Storm's heart was very, very good before he went to Galway. I've an owner out in Australia and he was telling me that all the good horses had it in Australia. We're still learning but I'm excited about it. I'm like a kid with a new toy."

If Flynn pursues continual improvement, so must Bahrain Storm as he will be aimed at the Champion Hurdle next march at Cheltenham. He needs to progress at least a stone to be competitive at that level, but his trainer likes a challenge.

"Of course he has improvement left in him, though he'll be up there with the top stuff now and he'll have to improve. I will hope to run him in the English Cesarewitch. Thereafter, I might put him in a few conditions hurdle races, run him in the Irish Champion Hurdle at Leopardstown and then the English Champion Hurdle. Davy Russell said after he won in Cork last month that it was sheer class that won out."

As we talk, I make note of Flynn's career wins, 582. Lest it have escaped me, I received a text from him the next day informing me that Wordly Wise had won the feature race in Gowran the previous evening to make it winner number 583.

"See if you can get to the 600 mark by Sunday," I replied, in reference to his most immediate training goal, to which he responded: "I'm Pat Flynn -- not Keith Barry!"

One of these Waterford men has performed works of magic, while the other is an illusionist.