If you’ve never been to a Grand National and are approaching an age when it is appropriate to list ten things to do before you die, then put Aintree near the top of your list. The Cheltenham Festival provides a glorious championships to test the best in our sport but the Grand National, the People’s Race, remains a very special experience. On the wall of the Legends Bar at the home of the National a cluster of plaques commemorates those who have been inducted into Aintree’s Hall of Fame and last Saturday a short ceremony marked the inclusion alongside horses like Red Rum, jockeys like AP McCoy and trainers like Vincent O’Brien of a disc celebrating the late, great sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney.
McIlvanney, the man who bridged the previously perceived division between penetrating and popular writing, was revered for his words about football and boxing — he wrote famously that heavyweight Joe Bug-ner ‘had the physique of a Greek statue but with fewer moves’, and described George Best as ‘gracefully riding tackles that would have derailed a locomotive’ — but he loved the racetrack too. He called the National ‘an annual blood-quickening blend of the epic and the personal’ and said of horseracing that ‘it doesn’t just generate excitement. It creates lore.’ More than any other race the National does that.
The 2019 Grand National was one of the special ones with nine-year-old Tiger Roll, once described by his adoring owner Michael O’Leary as ‘a little rat of a thing’, defying the statistics to repeat his 2018 success in the race and become the first horse since national treasure Red Rum in 1973 and 1974 to win back-to-back Nationals. The previous year Tiger Roll had won by a head.
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