Elsewhere, the more you have to spend, the more elaborately casual your attire. Sheikh Mohammed and his team wander round Tattersalls in jeans and baseball caps. At Saratoga, the horses may not cost as much - top price this time was the $1.3m paid by the Sheikh's man, John Ferguson, for a colt by Unbridled's Song - but the reverse applies to the wardrobes.On the walls, black-and-white photographs of past big spenders gaze down, as though from the golden age of Hollywood. They could not possibly approve of everyone - certainly not some of the bloodstock agents. These men spend days, with varying degrees of self-importance, surveying each yearling.

For two evenings, the sales complex at Saratoga is straight out of The Great Gatsby.As night deepens, the crowd around the timbered outdoor bar becomes exhilarated, in some primal way, by the tide of money crashing against the dais in the sales pavilion. Named The Green Monkey, he spent a forlorn month in Todd Pletcher's barn at Saratoga, his debut postponed by lameness.The mesmeric theatre of the sales season also has its opening skirmish here Needless to say, no auction has a more beguiling setting Goffs, in Ireland, is a breezeblock barracks. Next week, at the yearling sales in Keeneland, the Maktoums will again lock antlers with Coolmore. Nowadays, admittedly, their rivalry is most intense at the Florida "breeze-ups". It was there, in February, that Coolmore paid $16m (£8.5m) for a colt with little prospect of redeeming such an unprecedented ransom on the racetrack. Few who witnessed his Travers Stakes success will countenance defeat in the Breeders' Cup Classic.With Discreet Cat also exhibiting freakish talent, Saratoga may have suffused Sheikh Mohammed with a hazardous sense of vindication.

Certainly there is no mistaking the epochal resonance in Bernardini. Many, come to that, have been beaten at "The Graveyard of Favourites": it was here in 1919 that Man O'War met his only defeat, by a horse called Upset. Trainers sip coffee, shoot the breeze, watch their horses snorting past the deserted grandstand - with its crouched, sloping tiles, antique boxes, and gigantic wooden fans to relieve the sultry afternoons.Many great horses were anointed here. The enchantment of Saratoga has a bittersweet quality. Every summer, this clapboard spa town, lost among blue woods and green creeks in upstate New York, grants a pristine image of how America is supposed to be. For five weeks, it provides sanctuary to some of the best horses, jockeys and trainers in the world.