an unlikely hero.

​I’m old. Or, at least, older than a man should be if he wants to remain useful for any purpose other than using up resources better suited to the ‘know-everything-woke-youth that represents the greying future’. Anyway, advancing age is my only viable excuse for looking to the past to understand the failings of the present and the horror I might observe from my grave of a world without horses and racing. 
I live this week, the week of the Grand National, in similar vein to way the truly religious, and there’s not too many of them around these days, treat religious festivals. There are rituals to be observed, form to be read, silent prayers to be said for every horse and jockey to return unscathed and more personal/selfish prayers than for mankind to suddenly overnight become humane and peace-loving, and re-runs of past Grand Nationals on YouTube to refresh the memory of the black and tan days when Aintree could seem at times like a war-zone, with jockeys the soldiers, the horses shell-fire and on-lookers ghosts of a long-gone age. To intelligently look forward, past events must be observed with a kind eye, lessens learned, not condemned with a misunderstanding appraisal of the lives of our forebears.
Perhaps it is the rituals I uphold that prevents me from letting go of the past? The older a man gets, it seems, the more vital past memories become. To me, the Epsom Derby should revert to being run on the first Wednesday of June, with Parliament in recess in the afternoon to allow M.P.’s to attend the races; for all the benefit all-weather racing brings to the sport, I cannot help but believe in time it will be seen as the nail that sealed the coffin; and the modern-day Grand National, though I love it still, has become a silver-plated replica of its glory years.
The glory years of the Grand National, I contend, culminated with Red Rum, its greatest hero, equine or human. 1977 was the last of the glory years. Twelve-years before Red Rum create racing and sporting history with his unprecedented and unlikely ever to be repeated third victory, an American horse came to Aintree to achieve an ambition that began in 1912, the year Jerry M succeeded at Aintree under Ernie Piggott. 
Of course, it is merely a quirk of history that the grandfather of the immortal Lester achieved his fame in the same year as Harry Worcester Smith arrived at Liverpool Docks in his quest to achieve his sporting ambition to win the Grand National. He was a very wealthy man, not that Aintree has any respect for money or title, treating all its apparent conquerors with lofty disdain. Worcester Smith failed to conquer Aintree, as did his son who followed soon after.
Between Harry Worcester Smith and his grandson’s attempt at sporting immortality, American-owned horses did succeed at Aintree, with the small but mighty Battleship and Kellsboro Jack winning the race. But no American jockey had ever won the race.
Jay Trump was never destined to be a Grand National winner. He was a cast-off from the (then?) brutal dirt tracks, a survivor of a racetrack accident, graphically described in her wonderful book ‘The Will To Win’ by Jane McIlvane, and bought for a comparative song by Tommy Smith for Mary Stephenson because he was the only horse he half-liked for the money he had to spend.
Of course, to achieve the dream the American horse defeated ‘our’ favourite steeplechaser, Freddie, second in two successive Grand Nationals, himself a fairy-tale horse as he was an ex-hunter, owned and trained by a Scottish farmer, Reg Tweedie. I don’t think I truly forgave the American invader until I read Jane McIlvane’s book and became aware of the epic scale of the unlikely victory, of how the horse repaid in spades the kindness and love of the people who rescued him from the ‘hell’ of his previous life.
Not only had Jay Trump won the Maryland Hunt Cup over timber on two occasions but as if that and a Grand National victory were not enough to cement his name in U.S. racing history, the year after winning at Aintree he returned and won a third Maryland Hunt Cup, as if to remind his former rivals that, despite having to learn to jump in a different style in Britain, he was still king of the timber rails. As with his jockey, he retired that day, watched by Fred Winter who trained both the horse and jockey, and who had just won his second Grand National with Anglo, the first horse Tommy Smith had sat at Fred’s stables in Lambourn, and promptly fell off.
Yes, sadly, the Grand National on Saturday will be exciting as always, a wonder to behold, and it will provide a ‘story’, and doubtless an ambition will be achieved, but it will be a replica of the glory days when spirited amateurs could dream of fulfilling their grandfather’s dream with a cast-off horse bred for the backwaters of U.S. dirt tracks and fast-track the training career of one of Britain’s greatest jockeys.