crossed-fingers time.

​I hope Aintree and the B.H.A. have plans in place in the event the Grand National is prevented from being staged this coming Saturday due to waterlogging. Clerk of the Course Suleka Varma is confident the soil composition and drainage system at Aintree will cope with any amount of rain thrown at it, and I am sure we all hope she is correct.
Anyone who is a sucker, as I am, for re-runs of past Grand Nationals, especially pre-television coverage, will have seen footage of the 1955 race won by Pat Taaffe and Quare Times when due to waterlogging the water jump was omitted, the only time, I believe, this has ever happened, with puddles the length of a horsebox on the landing side of the first fence. I suspect the course had no drainage back then and the horses galloped through the water seemingly without incident, though it did not look rather amateurish and it cannot be envisaged a similar scenario would be allowed in this day and age.
Heavy going, as far as the Grand National is concerned, is not necessarily a bad turn-of-events, as it slows the race down and as long as riders of tired horses pull-up a fence early rather than a fence too late, casualties in the way of fallers will be kept to very small numbers. What we can expect this weekend is very few finishers, perhaps as few as four or five, with Nassalam the most obvious beneficiary of rain rain and more rain, though he still has to jump the fences.
When Red Marauder won in 2001 in similar conditions to what we can expect this Saturday, there were calls after the event, especially by one of the Grand National’s most vocal champions, Alastair Down, that it was a mad decision to go ahead with the race, a rare occasion when Alastair’s sense of humour failed him. The 2001 renewal, to use one of Alastair’s favourite phrases, was run in conditions that resembled ‘the Battle of the Somme’, though at Aintree there were no fatalities, unlike in 1916. The only unlucky combination, apart from Mark Pitman and the gallant Smartie, were Carl Llewellyn and Beau, taken out of the race neither by the conditions nor by falling but by the reins ending-up on the same side of Beau’s neck after a great recovery by the jockey when Beau all but fell. With no steering, Llewellyn struggled on before being unseated two-fences later. He looked the likely winner until calamity struck. It was all good fun, though, do you not think?
Excess speed is Aintree’s enemy as horses get taken out of their comfort zone while at the same time having to cope with unfamiliar fences and racecourse topography. Firm ground, as when Mr.Frisk broke Red Rum’s course record in 1990, will never occur again at Aintree as artificial watering is now employed so that the ground is at least good if not good-to-soft. I might be overly pessimistic in forecasting a low number of finishers as the fences are less foreboding than in 2001, with Becher’s rendered a neutered pussy-cat compared to the days when the ghosts of the long-dead used trip-wire to bring down horses and invisible hands dragged jockeys out-of-the-saddle. 
I am sure it will weigh heavily on the mind and conscience of the clerk-of-the-course if a decision must be made on Saturday morning to go-ahead or not to go-ahead if there were fatalities in either the Foxhunters or the Topham. The sport, as with Aintree, needs the revenue that the Grand National generates and she will be pressured, I am sure, to declare the ground safe to race; the sport, though, cannot be faced with another fiasco. In 2001 we did not walk on egg-shells, the wolf that is animal rights activists, was not howling at our door. The term ‘social licence’ was also not bandied about in 2001. 2001 was a life-time ago. 2001 was another country. In 2001, the country and the world were less corrupted.
The Grand National must be run but not at the cost of the sport’s reputation. Postponing for a week might interfere with the racing schedule, make life difficult for I.T.V. and the satellite channels. But if postponing is what must be done, let it be done. Crossed-fingers the B.H.A. have a plan set-aside to reschedule, not just abandon as they decided back in the humiliating year of two false starts and egg stains on the face of the sport that still smell to this day.