RACING/In Focus: For flat trainers now is the best time of the season, right at the start. Brian O'Connor visits the Curragh base of Dermot Weld and runs the rule on the trainer's top prospects.

Everything is possible and with the Curragh basking in sunshine yesterday morning, few appear to have brighter possibilities than Dermot Weld.

Just two all-flat fixtures have been run in Ireland and Weld has had a winner at each of them. But now the world-renowned trainer is preparing his 107-strong team to really get into top gear.

It makes for pretty impressive viewing up the nine furlong Old Vic all-weather gallop that slashes through the Curragh. And in the middle of them all, anonymous except for the presence of stable jockey Pat Smullen on his back, is a colt that just might be the most impressive of all.

Refuse To Bend, unbeaten in two races as a juvenile, including the Group 1 National Stakes, is an A1 genuine classic prospect, the sort to make any trainer jump out of bed in the morning.

Weld is much too suave a character to admit to such tendencies but the Epsom Derby remains a glaring omission on a winning CV that stretches from the US to Australia to Hong Kong and most points in between. For an intensely competitive man, such things count.

Media Puzzle enforced that even further in November's Melbourne Cup but right now his three-year-old half brother has a limitless horizon ahead of him.

Refuse To Bend worked after racing at Leopardstown on Saturday and will return there on Sunday week for the 2,000 Guineas Trial.

That fits in with a public profile that has him a general second favourite for the Sagitta 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket. Significantly, though, Weld expects the colt to be more of a Derby type.

"I'm surprised to see him so high in the Guineas betting. I see him as more of a horse for the Epsom Derby but we don't know for certain yet.

"We will know a lot more after Leopardstown. If he pleases me there he will go for the Guineas. If the mile is too sharp he'll go for the Derrinstown Derby Trial.

"But we're very relaxed about it. The main thing is that we have him right. He looks well, he has a great skin on him and we're very hopeful," he said.

Although Weld insists this is a transition year after the loss of some stars of 2002, there is enough confidence emerging from Rosewell House to suggest this could be a vintage season.

The angular Miss Nashwan will run in a Stakes race at Navan before travelling to Milan in May for the Oaks d'Italia. There is also a select group of well bred, unexposed three-year-old colts that could yet develop into serious tools and backing up the youngsters is the reassuring presence of established stars like Vinnie Roe and Media Puzzle.

Vinnie Roe ran an epic fourth to his stable mate in Melbourne but if the triple St Leger winner was soured by the weight he had to carry then he was hiding it well behind a display of rude good health yesterday.

"I am of the firm belief that it takes them six months to come back from the exertions of going to Melbourne.

"Media Puzzle will go back to Melbourne again but ideally with Vinnie Roe I'd like to train him for the Arc. He showed a lot of pace when he was racing behind the likes Galileo and Milan."

A dark horse in the camp, however, could be Former Senator. In an Irish Times preview for the year ahead last January, Weld nominated the brother to the Irish Oaks winner Dance Design as a potential star. His first run, in a Curragh listed race, did nothing to quell the optimism.

"I loved the pace he showed for a horse that will get a mile and a half. He is a very good maiden. We have some nice maidens and the hope is that one of them could go to the very top.

"We have an unraced Red Ransom colt called Military Option who I like a lot and could run at the Curragh on Sunday. There is also a Kingmambo colt called Mullazem who looks good," he said.

But that's the beauty of this time of year. It's like the old adage of it being better to travel hopefully than arrive. Except for the Weld class of 2003, the reality might prove even better than the anticipation.