It all depends how you like your fairy tales. OK, so we would have loved the retiring Tony ‘AP’ McCoy, 20 years a champion, to have won his last Grand National on Shutthefrontdoor, owned by his long-time patron J.P. McManus, jump racing’s biggest benefactor. But fate rarely reads the full script and this year’s National went instead to the talented Many Clouds, owned by Trevor Hemmings, another who has poured a fortune into racing. Many Clouds was trained in Lambourn by the generous-hearted Oliver Sherwood, a man claimed truly as a friend by more people in racing than anyone else I know and who has in his choice of riders and assistants over the years launched a whole series of racing careers. Until the past two years Oliver was struggling to get back to the big time and he had only had five National runners over the years, none of which had completed the course. ‘I have never doubted what I could do but I haven’t before had the ammunition to go to war.’
For good measure Leighton Aspell, riding his second National winner in two years, had himself ‘retired’ for nearly two years back in 2007, so watching two supreme horsemen in Leighton and Paddy Brennan aboard Tom George’s Saint Are fight out an epic finish with no equine or human casualties was quite enough of a fairy tale for me.
I first started reporting the National for the Liverpool Daily Post in the 1960s and it gets better every year. After this one I woke at 3 a.m. not to worry about the Waitrose wine bills but simply because the images kept replaying so vividly in my mind. The Cheltenham Festival, the ultimate test in every department, is the event for jump racing’s core aficionados.
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