“At the outset, we were 33-1 just to get him back on the track,” Jamie Osborne says of Toast Of New York, who will be in Miami this time next week preparing for the $16m Pegasus World Cup, the world’s richest race. “And it was 1,000-1 that he would ever race again at the highest level. So, as you can tell, I’m starting to get a little bit excited.”

He has every right. Toast Of New York is still a 25-1 chance to win the Pegasus at Gulfstream Park on 27 January, but his return to the track at the age of seven, after what seemed to be a career-ending injury, more than a thousand days away and then a brief career as a stallion, has the potential to be the most extraordinary racing story of this or any year. The trainer’s friends have started to suggest who should play him in the inevitable movie if Toast is the winner a fortnight on Saturday. Mike Myers is the early favourite.

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It is just over three years since Toast Of New York finished a nose behind Bayern and a neck in front of California Chrome in the 2014 Breeders’ Cup Classic, at the end of one of the finest three-way stretch duels anyone can remember. No less than 1,131 days later, he returned to win a minor conditions race at Lingfield in December by a length, looking much more like a stallion than a racehorse as he did so.

There are no obvious precedents for the task that Osborne and his horse will attempt to complete in Florida this month, when the field of top-class dirt horses chasing the huge first prize will include Gun Runner, last year’s Breeders’ Cup Classic winner. Osborne, though, expects the long odds against Toast Of New York to shrink as the second running of the Pegasus, in which owners buy “berths” for their horses for $1m a time, draws closer.

“To a degree, I’d say the world still doesn’t believe that it’s possible,” Osborne said on Thursday. “At Lingfield, he beat a horse rated 105 and looked the size of a house. What’s the probability of him getting back to running to a mark in the mid-120s? But what we’ve seen since Lingfield has been a total transformation. If you saw him now, he looks like an older, stronger version of what we saw at Santa Anita in 2014. He’s just changed, he doesn’t look like a stallion any more and he’s unbelievably well.

“The question is, do horses start to deteriorate by the age of seven, if they haven’t had the wear and tear? This horse basically had 15 or 16 months of his life that was quite intense, then he went back to bed for three years. I’m very confident now that he deserves to be in the Pegasus field and that the Toast of old will show up. Whether or not that is good enough to beat Gun Runner, we will see on the day.”

Quick guide Greg Wood's Friday racing tips Show Hide Lingfield Park 12.20 Star Story 12.50 Father Ailbe 1.20 Dark Alliance 1.50 Complicit 2.20 Mystique Moon 2.50 Dutiful Son 3.20 Nautical Haven 3.50 Roundabout Magic Sedgefield 1.10 Main Fact 1.40 Quick Pick 2.10 Frankie Ballou 2.40 Canny Style 3.10 Kings Eclipse 3.40 Colby Huntingdon 1.30 Le Capricieux 2.00 Leapaway 2.30 Global Domination (nb) 3.00 Style De Garde (nap) 3.30 Bentelimar 4.00 Dory Newcastle 5.45 The British Lion 6.15 Cherry Oak 6.45 My Target 7.15 Tommy G 7.45 Dubai Acclaim 8.15 Blastofmagic

Toast Of New York will have a final piece of work next Tuesday, fly to Miami on Wednesday and clear quarantine on Monday week for five days of gentle track work before his $16m target.

“When they see him on the track, there won’t be a better specimen of an animal there,” Osborne says. “He is an absolute monster now, the finished article, a template for what a racehorse should look like. He has a dirt action, a dirt physique and his will to win is extraordinary. He has an unbelievable desire to put his head in front, and in the heat of battle at Gulfstream, I think that will still be intact.”