THE SPRING DOUBLE.

I was rifling through a drawer of my writing desk the other day and found the entries for the 2025 Aintree National and realised that this year I had not taken a copy of the entries from the Racing Post and neither had I payed any attention to the weights. I also believe I did not read the comments of the high and mighty who were in attendance at the announcements of the weights. I will be 72 in April and for far more years than I care to remember, perhaps going back to the days of when there was both the Sporting Life and Sporting Chronicle in existence, I have cut out of the paper the list of entries, removed the names of horses scatched from the race over the following weeks and months, kept abreast of the likely forty-running by underling the fortieth horse in red ink, that significant mark slowly falling down towards the bottom of the weights, until the day came when the four-day declarations were in the paper and I had to make my choices for the Saturday.

Whether I can be considered a litmus test for the popularity of the modern-day National, I doubt. I am of the age where nostalgia for what is lost is greater than realism for what remains. Yet I was saddened by the realism that the entries and the announcement of the weights had passed me by in the same way as the entries for the Lincoln, another race that is but a ghost of what it formerly was, and who speaks these days of the Spring Double or even the more attainable Autumn Double?

 What pains me is that the Cambridgeshire still retains echoes of its heritage, whereas the National and the Lincoln have become so modernised that the jockeys and trainers of the past, the shoulders of whom our modern-day heros stand upon, is that neither race looks anything like it used to in its heyday. I accepted the Grand National, as was, needed to evolve but but it did not deserve to be sytematically taken apart, stripped of its sub-title of 'the race of the people', the romance that was so imbued in the old race sacrificed so that only the elite of the sport could lift the trophy, all the records in its history made easier to obtain, the honour of just finishing the race now given away as with children at a school sports day receiving a rosette just for taking part irrespective of how useless they were.

Search the internet for film of the Lincoln when it was run on the Carholme at Lincoln. Forty, fifty runners. Research the jockeys and trainer of the 1920's 30's and through to when Lincoln closed and the race transferred to Doncaster. Winning the Lincoln was high on the c.v. of anyone lucky enough to win the race. Lester Piggott never won the race, not that he cared. But it was an ommission on his stellar career c.v. As with the Grand National, the Lincoln, too, is nowhere near the same race as it was in its history. Doncaster is the wrong venue for it. If it were to be transferred to Newmarket, at least it could have the same number of runners as the Cambridgeshire, which would more closely resemble the Lincoln of Harry Carr or Charlie Elliott.

I used to say that though the Grand National had changed since the days of Reynoldstown, at least it retained its aura of the historic battleground, remained the challenge of times gone by. But that was before the fences were neutured, the distance lessened, the number of runners diminished, the handicap mark heightened to a point whereby 'real National horses' are made ineligible. I was of the idea, and perhaps remain wedded to the idea, that the Lincoln could be run with forty runners  (mirroring the number that ran in the Grand National) and be started from a barrier, the barrier-start a reminder to present-day jockeys of the sport before starting stalls, where it might take twenty-minutes to achieve a level start.

But that was then. Now, this old bloke must live out the remains of his life in the knowledge that the dream of one day being involved in the Grand National is a meaningful way, and not by a walk to the local betting shop, is as lost as the fabled Spring and Autumn doubles.