SOME time in the next couple of days, Mark Johnston will set a new record for a racehorse trainer in the UK when he saddles his 4194th winner to surpass the total set by the now-retired Richard Hannon Snr.

In my humble opinion, though you never see his name of any ‘best’ list outside of racing, this extraordinary record makes Johnston one of the greatest of all Scottish sporting heroes. Over 30 years of training, the man born in Glasgow and raised in Aberfoyle has been simply the most consistent trainer of horses in Britain, a true punter’s pal because his horses live up to the motto of his Kingsley House stables at Middleham in Yorkshire – ‘Always Trying’.

The scale of Johnston’s achievement is staggering, not least because he has done it mostly without the backing of the super-rich and while being located ‘oop North’, a major drawback for anyone wishing to prosper in a sport dominated by Newmarket and points south.

His has been a magnificent story of a man from a council estate in East Kilbride working his way through university and then gambling on his own talent to set up in training in a near-derelict yard in Lincolnshire before sheer skill and hard work, plus his brilliance at captaining his team of workers, brought the rewards that no one in racing begrudges him – there’s hardly anyone in the sport with a bad word to say about Johnston, even those in authority that he has sometimes chastised.

It was back in July, 1987, that the newly-licensed trainer gained his first win with Hinari Video at Carlisle. A little over 31 years later, Johnston will set the new record and hopefully will finally received the acclaim that I have long thought he was entitled to.

Due to a quirk in the rules set by the British Horseracing Authority and by the Jockey Club prior to them, Johnston has never been champion trainer because that title is calculated on money won rather than number of winners or else he would have been champion on numerous occasions – the jockeys’ championship is about number of winners, so why not the same for trainers?

He has won a total of seven figures in most seasons, and he’s had Classic winners – double 1000 Guineas heroine Attraction among them – while he nearly always gets winners at Royal Ascot and Glorious Goodwood, but it’s the way he has accumulated victories at the lesser tracks that makes him unique.

Johnston’s yard is renowned for its consistency and the statistics prove it. He has sent out more than 100 winners in every year since 1994 and more than 200 winners in seven of the last nine years having become the first trainer to achieve that feat back in 2009.

His greatest supporter is his assistant trainer and wife Deirdre. She once told me that she had met Mark while she was still a schoolgirl and had decided more or less right away that they would get married at some point. She is a formidable horsewoman and often rides the stable’s stars to report back to Mark on a horse’s progress or lack of it.

Together they make a great team and they have surrounded themselves at Middleham with terrific jockeys over the years – the underrated Joe Fanning still boots home winners and Keith Dalgleish was another of my favourites – and the very best grooms and backroom staff.

There is one obvious feat missing from Johnston’s CV and that is his failure to win the Epsom Derby – well, not yet. But there are many excellent trainers in that category and surely it is just a matter of time before he bags the Blue Riband.

Johnston always said that he considers his training as a vet at Glasgow to be one of his most important accomplishments. It meant that when he took up training he was a much better judge of how far he could push a horse physically, yet he had nearly always employed a vet and always listens to a second opinion.

In some ways he is the Alex Ferguson of racing because like the greatest football manager this country has ever produced, Johnston is a ferociously hard worker who has always left no detail unattended to in the search for winners. Though he has lived in England for more than three decades, Johnston remains a proud Scot – the Johnston tartan is all over his stable and the staff uniforms – and his support for Scottish racing over the decades has been unsurpassed. No doubt Scottish Racing has already considered how it is going to recognise Johnston’s record and it would not be out of place for his alma mater, Glasgow University, to bestow a honorary doctorate on a man who has done Scotland proud for so long.

You can tell by now that I am huge fan of Mark Johnston. All Scots should be.