Racing: My Emma and Guest arrive at the top table

When My Emma lines up for Europe's richest horse-race, tomorrow's Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, it will be the culmination of a two-year plan and a long-held dream for one of Newmarket's less celebrated trainers, Rae Guest.

Rae Guest heard My Emma had fallen over while he was away in Ireland. The words flip and fiddlesticks did not go through his mind. "But it was something beginning with eff," he said.

With a fortnight to go before the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe and near the culmination of a two-year strategy this was not the greatest news the Newmarket trainer could have received. He returned immediately for a bedside vigil. "As soon as I heard she'd slipped up the first thing I wanted to do was get back," he said. "It wasn't as if I could do anything, but I had to get back.

"It was the biggest blow that I, the owner and everyone in the yard could get. We've been planning this for two years. It wasn't as if anyone had died, but it was the next worst thing for all of us."

It has not been quite time for dark clothes and a passage from Auden, however. A patched-up My Emma has again been sighted on the training grounds at Headquarters this week and tomorrow she will demonstrate her abilities in the Bois de Boulogne. If good guys do indeed finish last, the filly will be tailed off, though the form book does not promote that likelihood.

Rae Guest is the most understated of Newmarket's many trainers. In fact it is hard to believe he is a trainer at all sometimes. He exudes neither an air of great supremacy nor a suggestion that his job is what keeps the globe spinning on its axis. But he does know what he is talking about.

In racing, there are enough Guests to fill a marquee and Rae comes from a line that includes his brother, Richard, winner of a Champion Hurdle and uncles Nelson, a trainer, and Joe. The latter is remembered for the impressions he left at jumping racetracks, both on his audiences and in the terrain. They called him either the Iron Man or the India Rubber Man.

Rae Guest himself was a rider of some aplomb both here and in Denmark, compiling 600 career winners, the most notable of them as an aide-de-camp of Luca Cumani. He was at the controls on Tolomeo when the colt was third to Teenoso and Sadler's Wells in a King George, and he was the gallops tutor of good horses such as Bairn and Half A Year. Nothing though prepared him for the exhilaration of morning manoeuvres on My Emma. "If you've worked horses all your life you should know when one is a little bit better than the rest," he said. "My Emma is the best horse I've been on. Even Tolomeo and horses like that would struggle to beat her."

By the time he left the weighing room for the last time Guest had purchased Chestnut Tree Stables, which is hidden in Newmarket's version of the Lost Valley. At the bottom of the yard you can count 25 horses, but the only one that counts is My Emma. Guest understood that she was an uncommonly useful filly soon after she arrived in his keeping but it took some time to prove it.

As a three-year-old My Emma developed an internal nasal obstacle, while a similar protuberance on the outside lent her the impression of an equine Karl Malden. "She got this cyst, what they call a polyp, on her nose," Guest said. "That had to come off."

By the time the nurses had waved My Emma farewell the Classics had come and gone. The filly won her maiden at Newmarket, after which Guest said she would one day win an Arc. Those within earshot waited for an orderly with a butterfly net to take him to a secure institution.

There was not so much sniggering though when My Emma was sent on a foray to France for the Prix Vermeille. She won and the historical precedents of All Along, Ivanjica and Allez France - all of whom won the Arc the year after success in the Vermeille - were produced. This season's programme included another Group One success, in the Yorkshire Oaks, and the march seemed relentless. Then came Black Sunday.

"If anything goes wrong with her it's always because she's caused it herself," Guest said. "Because she's that much better than the rest of them she always has energy left over. And wherever it's most slippery she seems able to jump on to that spot.

"That morning she was just too well in herself and she slipped just after she came out of her box. When she got back from her gallop there was this great haematoma on her backside, a blood blister the size of half a football.

"I suddenly felt everyone was against us, especially as she's had only two runs all year and everything has been planned. It was a bitter blow."

It was a bitter day too on Tuesday when My Emma emerged to continue her recuperation. The filly was up before the sun and taken through light drizzle to a Conan Doyle morning on Newmarket's Watered Gallop. Among those pulling their collars fast on the trial ground were workwatchers and My Emma's owner, Ian Matthews, whose daughter has lent her name to the filly.

My Emma and her usual work rider, Paul Tulk, set off beind Guest on a lead horse, Montecristo. The hoofbeats disappeared into the mist and when the two forms returned the order had changed and there was a considerable distance between them. Tulk reported it was the best My Emma had ever worked. Guest was more circumspect. "She has been really stiff and sore but she worked really good," the trainer said. "She's happier within herself and by Sunday she should be 100 per cent.

"If we hadn't had this accident we'd have gone there very confident. But a hiccup is a hiccup and you never know how much it's affected her. Whatever happens, everyone associated with the filly is proud of her."

In the run-up to Longchamp, Guest has received heaps of enquiries about My Emma's welfare, several from people whose only connection with her is that a member of their family bears a similar name. There have been promises to ring back with congratulations should she win the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe. It would be nice to telephone Chestnut Tree Stables on Monday morning and find the line engaged.