RACING: Punters are proved right as Derby winner sees off his rivals, reports Paul Wheeler

Just how good is Sea The Stars? Until someone can come up with a horse who can test him we may never quite know. He may have a little way to go to claim a place in the pantheon of excellence, but he is certainly proving himself a cut above other recent Derby winners as he cast a long shadow on the Coral-Eclipse Stakes at Sandown Park yesterday.

The concept behind the Derby was to discover the best three-year-old colt in training but something has been going wrong with what used to be an infallible system as the previous six winners had been beaten next time out, but Sea The Stars had looked the real deal at Epsom and it was a case of promise delivered.

The tub-thumpers had been on overtime last week trying to extol the chances of Conduit and Rip Van Winkle but punters were only interested in backing one horse and levered Sea The Stars in to 4-7 to follow the path of Nashwan that would take him from the 2000 Guineas to the Derby and then this clash of the generations, neatly forgetting that the last four Derby winners who had tried to win the Eclipse had all come up short.

With three pacemakers, supplied by the connections of both Conduit and Rip Van Winkle, Sea The Stars should not have been short of targets to chase from the stalls but he still flew out of the gates like a sprinter until Michael Kinane managed to persuade him to settle and allow Lang Shining and Set Sail to get on with their allotted task.

They took off four lengths clear of Malibu Bay, who was in turn tracked by Sea The Stars, leaving Rip Van Winkle and Conduit to take up a watching brief down the back straight. By the home straight Kinane had seen enough and eased Sea The Stars from his position on the rail to lead with more than two furlongs to run.

"I was in front too soon - ideally I wanted to be getting there at the furlong marker - but the opportunity was there," he said. "I couldn't sit and take a pull two-and-a-half down and give them the momentum."

Sea The Stars had the momentum but he had also put himself in the firing line and Jimmy Fortune, whom Aidan O'Brien had picked to ride Rip Van Winkle in place of the suspended Johnny Murtagh, was ready to pull the trigger and Ryan Moore still fancied his chances of a shot on Conduit.

Moore always looked to be firing blanks as Conduit never quite got into the contest but Fortune threw down the challenge in the last furlong. However, he was never really on terms. There may have been only a length separating Sea The Stars and Rip Van Winkle - with Conduit a four-and-a-half length third - but if Kinane ever had any doubts he hid them well.

"He just dossed a bit in front but my fella always finds something. He hasn't had a hard race. This is probably as much as he's blown because we were going proper racing pace and he was under the gun a bit."

Kinane, at 50, may have reached a time in life when most regard competitive sport as something best watched but the Irishman, who endured a rare blank in Group One races last year, showed no signs of flagging.

"Since the first day I sat on him I just couldn't believe he'd come along," he said with all the enthusiasm of a teenage apprentice.

"He has a great presence. I don't think you need to be a great judge of a horse to see that. He does catch the eye and he knows it - he ticks all the boxes."

As he ticks off the glittering prizes, John Oxx is left with a trainer's dream of deciding which big race is next on the list. The Irish Champion Stakes is high on the agenda with possibly the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes or the Juddmonte Inter-national beforehand, and few worries in between.

"The good ones tend to be very straightforward," Oxx said. "This horse could go any distance. Mick says he's so fast in the first four furlongs he jumps out and wants to tank along. But you can't pull him back, you've got to let him bowl along."

"He'd jump out and run in a sprint," Oxx added with a dead-pan punchline: "I know I'm sounding a bit like Aidan O'Brien when I say that but it's actually the reality with this one."