the greatest race ever - there's no argument.

​Richard Hoiles has stolen my thunder, the cad. In his ‘Greatest Ever Race’ selection in today’s Racing Post, he has nominated the 1973 Grand National. He has even dubbed the race ‘Crisp’s Grand National’, which I have always called it. In the same way that in the Stanley Matthews Cup Final (don’t ask me the date, I am hopeless at dates) Stan Mortensen scored three goals and he is all but forgotten about. Both horses were heroic, with Red Rum winning the race but Crisp hailed as the true hero on the day.
I will always remember 1973, the 31st of March. It was the day I ate humble pie for the first time.
I was back then, and still today to some degree, rather xenophobic when it comes to foreign invaders to these shores. Not with the Irish horses or jockeys, after all Arkle was of the Emerald Isle and he, even though Mill House was my first true love, was beyond envious thought. He was an equine God and it made no difference which country he represented. But horses from Europe, the U.S. and in Crisp’s case, Australia, really had to work hard to win my affection or approval. I always wanted English trainers and horses to win, Arkle excepted, of course. So up until March 31st, 1973, I was no admirer of the big and black Australian chaser, even if he had won the Champion 2-mile Chase at the National Hunt Festival. If anything, that was even more reason to not want him to win the Grand National.
I can’t remember what I backed in the race. As Spanish Steps was the great love of my life at the time, I must have backed him. It would have been gross disloyalty if I hadn’t. Of course, there wasn’t any moment during the race when I thought I would be collecting from the bookmaker and to be honest you would not have known he was in the race for much of the 4-mile 4-furlongs, though that can be said of the majority of the 38 starters.
We all know the race, so there is no point describing Crisp’s demolition of Aintree’s fearsome reputation. For the most part, I was a transfixed t.v. viewer. I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing. He wouldn’t get home, obviously. A blind pundit could see that a 2-mile chaser could never jump with the exuberance he was displaying and keep galloping even as far as Becher’s second time round.
As Julian Wilson said ‘I have never seen a horse so far ahead at this stage of the race’. That was Becher’s second time round. By Valentines, only the backers of Red Rum were not wanting the Australian mega-hero to gain the due rewards for his wonderous slaughter of Aintree’s reputation.
I watch the race even now, only occasionally as I still half-believe Crisp holds on or Richard Pitman does not pick up his stick to give Crisp an encouraging smack, unbalancing the horse and sucking the last vestiges of energy from him. Pitman owns up to the error. He believes, perhaps rightly, that his action was the difference between victory and defeat. I doubt if Fred Winter believed that tap on the rump made any difference. As Crisp jumped the second last fence, he turned to Sir Chester Manifold, Crisp’s owner, and said, ‘I’m afraid, Sir Chester, we are going to be beaten.’
Let’s right the record. Richard Pitman is a modest man deserving, in my opinion, of a knighthood and though he believes he was the reason Crisp failed to hold on, in my opinion his riding that day was one of the greatest rides of my lifetime. To have the skill and courage to go the shortest route around Aintree, where back then the drops were the longest, and to allow Crisp to basically run his own race, took a magnitude of bravery very few jockeys would ever dare copy.
And remember, Crisp was beaten ¾-of-a-length, giving the mighty Red Rum 23Ibs. No horse at any time in racing history, not even Arkle, could give that sort of weight in the Grand National to the greatest Aintree horse of all-time. Yet Crisp so very nearly did. Red Rum knocked 19-seconds of the race record, with the first four home all beating Golden Miller’s then fastest time, with L’Escargot also carrying 12-st, with Spanish Steps 1Ib less.
And it is that, sometimes overlooked, fact, aided by 1973 being the first of Red Rum’s 3 Grand Nationals victories, which makes me absolutely certain that the 1973 Grand National was the greatest horse race ever run.