Grand National Notebook

‘How’s your shoulder?’ someone asked recently, and it was only then I realised, for the first time in a while, that my shoulder felt good again. In last year’s Grand National — you might recall if you watched it on television — I had a heavy fall when going well on Long Run, the wonderful horse on whom I won the Gold Cup. I landed on my shoulder and had to hobble off the course. Those famously intimidating Grand National fences may have been made a bit more forgiving in recent years — thank God! — but they are still huge, and when you fall going over one it hurts.

Not that I’m put off. The Grand National continues to excite me as much as any horse-racing romantic. The National crams every human emotion into about eight minutes. It’s probably the closest thing we have to have a gladiatorial test. In the weighing room before the race, you sit there with 40 other jockeys. You realise that one of you is about to become a hero, but there is a palpable sense of danger, too: probably one in four of you is going to have a serious tumble and might end up in hospital. So you feel all these conflicting emotions: fear and rivalry but also excitement and goodwill towards the people you are up against. When it all goes wrong, the camaraderie can get you through it. Sitting in an ambulance with Barry Geraghty at Aintree a few years ago after another fall, I remember saying to him, ‘This isn’t a great way to end a race.’ He smiled and replied, ‘I can think of a lot worse.’ I instantly realised he was right.