i am maximus should be recorded as the first winner of ....

​To say ‘It is what it is’ is acceptance of a situation that cannot be changed. But what if Winston Churchill, on the invasion of Poland by the Nazis, had made the same comment to the British people? The whole of Europe might now be subject to the ideology of a fascist regime. If, on not at first securing a recording contract, Paul McCartney and John Lennon agreed ‘that it is what it is’ and sold their guitars and signed-on at the local labour exchange? The music songbook would be depleted of music that is the equal of the greatest music of the past.
I, now, must say, in regard of the race won by I Am Maximus on Saturday, it is what it is. It cannot be changed.
I have tried over the weekend to make sense of my instinctive, if out-on-a-limb, position on this issue. I have loved the Grand National since the day I first witnessed the race. I came upon the race only a few years before the first of ‘the last-ever Nationals’, when Mirabel Topham shocked the sporting world by announcing she was selling Aintree racecourse to developers. I believe that was the last time I cried. Something magical and inspiring was to be taken from me, so soon after it had entered my life and switched me on to something that would transform my life’s path.
I have defended the Grand National over the years with every strand of sense I possessed and I still have somewhere one of the sweat-shirts I bought with my pocket-money when the Jockey Club went cap-in-hand to the public in an effort to raise the funds to save Aintree racecourse from being developed into an housing estate. Now I find myself a critic of the race, not because it is in any way cruel but because it is a neutered version of what went before. I have tried to credit the alterations by dreaming of the scenario whereby if the same had occurred in the early sixties Arkle might have graced Aintree with his presence. Or Desert Orchid in later years. But, of course, if the Grand National had been neutered in the 1960’s we would never have had Red Rum as Crisp would have won in 1973 by a large margin.
If I am to accept the appeasement of ‘it is what it is’, I cannot accept I Am Maximus, as worthy a winner as he undoubtedly is, as the 170th winner of the Grand National but the first winner of the Aintree National, the new version of the grand old race, not so much a replica as a memory of what went before, I Am Maximus not so much the latest addition to the pantheon of great horses to win over the National fences but the first of the new pantheon.
In the same way I can no longer refer to our country as ‘Great Britain’ and must refer to it simply as Britain, as to my mind the politicians of this country no longer make the meaningful contributions to society and freedom that confers greatness on a country, I cannot use the word ‘Grand’ when talking or writing about the Aintree National. Though the race provided a spectacle in its new guise, it was in no way ‘grand’, with no achievement worthy of being recorded in dispatches for being one of the finishers, for surviving intact the greatest test of the steeplechaser and jockey.
I will not condemn the race I witnessed, and yes, enjoyed, but it was not the ‘Grand National’ but a new race, a race with provenance yet without the nicks and cracks that, if it were an antique clock, would satisfy experts that it is genuine and not either a reproduction or a fake.
My critics will suggest I would not be happy unless the plough of the original template was reinstated, along with the stone-wall and the huge gaping ditch at Bechers and Valentines. Many of the changes down the years were required and though at first against the changes in 2012, I came to accept them as positives. It is the recent alterations, the tinkering with an institution, that have enflamed my heart, the sanitising to appease the ignorant, the protection of the cash-cow rather than the race itself. It is the slippery slope effect that in five-years-time might see the Canal Turn replaced by a smoother transition from the Foinavon fence to Valentines, the number of fences reduced to 29, the test for horse and rider lessened once more. 
If you want to understand how I feel, recall the day you lost the love of your life.