YET MORE REFLECTIONS ON THE GRAND NATIONAL.

​With few exceptions the Grand National is not won by great steeplechasers. Golden Miller, of course, won the race in 1934 and L’Escargot, in receipt of 11lbs it must be remembered, triumphed over Red Rum in 1975. Others will dispute my opinion but apart from Red Rum, king supreme around Aintree, no other Grand National winner can come near to the five-time and two-time Gold Cup winners. As much as I would like to see genuine Gold Cup horses in the Grand National I cannot ever see it happening due to the lucrative races run at Aintree on its Mildmay course and at Punchestown.
For the huge investment he makes to National Hunt racing no one should begrudge Michael O’Leary his good fortune in winning two Grand Nationals in three years. But since its inception the Grand National been considered a great leveller, allowing anyone with the ability to train a racehorse the opportunity to win the historic race. In short, the race is increasingly losing the bloom of romance that was once its byword. Tiger Roll maybe ‘a rat of a thing, with the heart of a lion’ but he is not a pony trained by a farmer in a part of Dartmoor unseen by civilisation for a hundred years. He is owned by a billionaire and trained by the most successful trainer in either Ireland or Britain. Such combinations should win the world’s greatest horse race but there is a danger with the conditions of the race now favouring the better-class handicapper that the big battalions will dominate for evermore and the unknown faces with dour stayers and brilliant jumpers in their stable will become excluded from even chancing their arm in the race.
On Saturday Milansbar was a gallant and very respectable fifth, the first British trained horse to finish. Yet when the weights were published his connections thought it highly unlikely his lowly rating would allow him into the race and they consequently ran him in two 4-mile chases since his effortless win at Warwick, a preparation unlikely to be repeated next season. The horse looked like a natural Aintree horse on Saturday, whereas one or two higher rated horses did not. The same might be said of other horses whose rating disallowed them entry into the race, with Vintage Clouds an obvious example. The Grand National should have the right horses participating and not necessarily the highest rated, especially when those ratings are achieved on park courses and over much shorter distances to the Grand National.
I am firmly of the opinion that Aintree should stage a race over the National fences at every meeting so that horses who would not normally get in the big race can show themselves as ‘National types’ and boost their rating. Perhaps there is a case for staging a race at the ‘Old Roan’ meeting for horses who failed to get in the previous season’s Grand National. Or such a race could be open to all horses within a rating band but with preference given to those horses that failed to get in the previous year’s race.
If the National fences are, as seems the case to the layman, fairer and more inviting, I cannot see why, except for the cost implication, they cannot be used more often. An Aintree meeting without the National fences always comes across as a little Ant without Dec, Ruby without A.P.. We have a Cheltenham Trials Day, why not a Grand National Trials Day? If the powers-that-be are sincere in wanting to engage more people with our sport surely the best tactic is to attract them with the most alluring of our attractions. I would keep the Becher Chase as it is but move the Grand Sefton to another day and have alongside it a new race over the Becher Chase distance, plus my idea of a consolation National race run at its first meeting of the season.
There was a time when the powers-that-be gave the Grand National little or no consideration. Now, thankfully, they appreciate it as the brightest gem in racing’s crown. The Grand National and Aintree racecourse must be safeguarded as if they are twinned with Stonehenge, St.Paul’s Cathedral or the Pyramids of Giza and not be allowed to return to the bad old days of Mirabel Topham, Bill Davies, the High Court and the proposal to build an housing estate on the sport’s most hallowed ground. To horse racing Aintree is of similar significance to sites of antiquity. It is the founding father of our sport. It is sacred ground. No stone should be left unturned in the upkeep of the Grand National’s importance and image and to this effect I urge the guardians of the race to do all they can to ensure the right horses line up at the start of the race.
I am of an age when the onset of arthritis and the other maladies of six score years can only be close by. Yet the Grand National remains as much a fascination as it was when Merryman triumphed for Gerry Scott and Neville Crump back in the days of black and white television. I just hope there were six-year-olds watching the race on Saturday for whom the Grand National will remain a spectacle of wonder as it does with me.
Long live the National!