the brilliant jumper who falls, the chair & the national of my birth year.

​Apparently, in the aftermath of Constitution Hill starting his sequence of hitting the deck, the great but not the greatest horse was espied by Barry Geraghty jumping one of Cheltenham’s steeplechase fences. Was he making a statement to his trainer that he wanted to try his hooves at the big boy’s game?
Geraghty, in a gesture of wanting to be helpful, suggested to Nicky Henderson that it might help Constitution Hill concentrate his mind more fully on the race at hand if he were to be schooled over fences. It seems since Cheltenham Nicky has tried everything bar schooling the horse over fences, which suggests, given the horse has fallen again in the same way he contrived to get himself on the floor the previous time, that schooling over fences could not possibly make the problem worse even if it does not make things any better.
What I took from the interview with Nicky Henderson after the race yesterday was that Nico de Boinville thought they should proceed with their plan to go to Punchestown ‘as the hurdles over there would suit the horse better than the English versions’. That statement suggests to me that the problem will not be easily solved if the problem is the English-style hurdles. As always, I hesitate to put forward my solution when Nicky Henderson is so often proved right in whatever approach he decides to take to any difficulty, but if I were to be asked my opinion, I would suggest not running at Punchestown in favour of an extensive period of schooling over fences as preparation for a chasing career from next season onwards. The horse was bought as a prospective chaser, Nicky Henderson said after his first win over hurdles that ‘he was a chaser in the making’ and if they opt-out of fences for Constitution Hill now he will never get the chance to attempt to achieve what he was bought to achieve. Yesterday he had what might be described as a thundering fall that might well have killed him. I am not saying that risk will be lessened by going chasing, but once a horse begins to fall on a regular basis, and 2 out of 2 is the making of a regular occurrence, the confidence of the horse will lapse and the confidence of the jockey in the horse will go, too.

Did Richard Hoiles say ‘the next fence is the Chair’ or words to that effect during the Foxhunters? I may have missed him mentioning the approach of the Chair fence as I do not have great powers of concentration. But if he did not, is this another indication that the Aintree fences have lost their identity? Of all of the iconic fences at Aintree, the Chair is the only one I have had any problem with, and that is more in mind with the Foxhunters and the Topham where it comes too early in the race for jockey and horse to have collected themselves into a nice, steady rhythm. The height of the fence is not the problem but the length. Whereas the third fence, Bechers and Valentines are wide enough to accommodate the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Chair is the same height but much narrower, with less space for manoeuvring to find space or the perfect stride. Yesterday only the easily likeable David Maxwell came to grief at the Chair and it is not a rarity these days for every horse, even in the National, to scale its summit without incident.
I just think if commentators are no longer naming the iconic fences in the course of their work it is a clear indication that Aintree has lost its reputation as the hardest test of both steeplechaser and jockey.

The Grand National of my birth was in 1954. Oh, an interesting fact that I hope visitors to this site were, as I was, unaware is that the Mildmay course at Aintree, named after the popular amateur rider Lord Mildmay-White, the man who introduced the Queen Mother to the sport, was first used in December, 1953.
The 1954 renewal of the race was staged on March 27th, 19-days before I came crying and screaming into this world. I no longer cry, though I often scream, especially at starters for the pathetic procedure they employ for starting a horse race.
The race provided Vincent O’Brien with the middle leg of his incomparable record of three straight Grand National victories, started by Early Mist and completed by Quare Times. Royal Tan scrapped home by a neck from Tudor Line. There were 9-finishers.
There were only 29-starters in 1954. 3-fell at the first and another 3 at the second. So much for fewer runners providing a safer race! Worse was to follow. Of the 29 only 25 arrived home afterwards. 3-horses, the favourite Coneyburrow (ridden by Pat Taaffe), Legal Joy and Paris New York suffered fatal injuries from their falls and Dominck’s Bar dropped down dead at some point.
I merely researched the 1954 Grand National as it was the year of my birth. A stab in the dark, if you wish. Yet here, I take no pleasure in reporting on equine deaths, especially at Aintree, is evidence that field size does not have much to do with equine fatality. 4 dead out of field size of 29. Yet in 1929, when no less than 66 faced the starter, they was only 1 fatality and in 1947, when 57 started, there were no fatalities.
Make what you will out that random statistic.