Monday Musings: Fences
We wait all year for the Grand National, anticipating the sternest examination in jump racing anywhere in the world, writes Tony Stafford. Such is the conditioned attitude that the great race has engendered over so many years, owners who have been around for a while, when lucky enough to own a top steeplechaser, are more often than not terrified of taking up the challenge.
We, or rather they, consider the fearsome fences, like the Chair, Becher’s Brook and the rest, and shrink away. Are they wise? Well let me give you a definitive if an admittedly after-timing answer. No, they are not!
The three races over said fences, Thursday’s Fox Hunters, Friday’s Topham and Saturday’s Randox-sponsored £1 million feature, carried big fields by day to day standards, even if the latest modification (or rather mutilation) of the big race has reduced the maximum field to 34 – denuded further with two on-the-day defections on Saturday - more about that later.
The Chair did prove too much of a jumping test for two of the 24 runners among Thursday’s hunter chasers – we were used to seeing 30 - two of them falling at that point. Then again, one was a 50/1 shot, the other was 66’s.
So the biggest of the 16 obstacles and which, along with the water in front of the stands, is one of only two to be jumped once, would surely take more fallers over the next two days. It didn’t, and nor did any of the other 15 obstacles over all three.
Thus, I’m sure we had the first ever Grand National where there had not been a single faller. True, four horses unseated their riders, ironically one of them was last year’s winner Corach Rambler, who continued only briefly having left Derek Fox on the deck at the opening obstacle days after the jockey had recovered from injury just in time to aim for the repeat. Corach Rambler actually did fall, unencumbered by a jockey, at the very next fence and then was seen veering to the right having refused at the third. Three-in-one, unseated, fell and refused at the first three obstacles!
Seven were pulled up, so that left 21 of the 32 starters to complete the course. In the Fox Hunters, in addition to those two fallers at the Chair (fence three), three unseated and seven pulled up, leaving ten finishers. The Topham also had 24 starters, one of which unseated and six more pulled up leaving an almost unfathomable 17 (71%) to get round. These are unprecedented figures, especially on soft or heavy going.
In my usual way of securing a comprehensive analysis, I thought a quick look back two decades to one of my most memorable races, 2004, the year that Graham Lee rode that wonderful race on Ginger McCain’s Amberleigh House, would provide a useful yardstick.
Graham’s ride that day was the Grand National performance I always considered the best I’d seen. He coolly took a pull when most jockeys would have gone hell for leather at the third-last, saving enough in the testing ground to come out on top. Graham rode quite a few winners for me in his Wilf Storey days and it’s a poignant thought that he suffered his horrific injuries after switching to the flat.
The ground was testing that week twenty years ago, but times for the three respective races, the Fox Hunters, Topham and Grand National were all significantly faster than the 2024 versions. This year’s Fox Hunters took around 18 seconds longer to complete; the Topham 12 seconds more and the Grand National seven seconds more even though the course had dried significantly over the previous 24 hours.
The 2004 Fox Hunters had six fallers, two brought down and two pulled up. The Topham that year had eight fallers, two brought down and one refusal while four horses pulled up. In Amberleigh House’s Grand National, nine fell, two were brought down, two refused, seven unseated rider and eight pulled up.
All the modifications have done is to make it little more than a park race. High-class chasers, especially those so redolent of the Irish steeplechasing scene, can continue year to year, mopping up the many Graded and Listed races around their country and maintaining a status that guarantees a place in next year’s field.
Here, the good horses have to run in the few well-endowed but ultra-competitive high-class handicap chases in the calendar like the Coral Gold Cup at Newbury in early December or the Welsh Grand National, also sponsored by Coral at Chepstow on the day after Boxing Day.
Nassalam has been the unwitting vehicle for the grossest example of a handicapping error from his win in the Welsh National, and for once I’m not blaming the official it concerns, but our system. Nassalam had already won a handicap chase at Chepstow a month earlier when he went back to the track for the 3m5f feature. Gary Moore’s gelding was always in contention but in heavy ground, as they moved out of the back straight, his mastery was already evident.
In an eerie foreshadowing of Saturday’s big race, there were no fallers that day at Chepstow, largely because by the time most of them had got to the end of the back straight, they had already given up. Of the 19 horses that set off, five completed, with Iron Bridge off levels with the winner, nearest but beaten 34 lengths.
Iron Bridge, trained by Jonjo O’Neill in the Hemmings Racing colours, and at eight two years senior to Nassalam, hadn’t won a race for some time and his best chase form, far from in top races, had been in novice handicap chases. If the handicapper had been able to wait until the four other horses that completed ran again, he might have acted a little less extravagantly. None of the quartet has done a thing since. All of them were probably bottomed by their run behind Nassalam, so to rate that as a 16lb improvement was simply horrific.
I think Gary Moore, brave enough to let him take his chance in the Grand National even after pulling up in between at Cheltenham in the Gold Cup, has a very strong case to appeal. By going to 161 he was giving weight to a former Gold Cup winner in Minella Indo on Saturday. That one finished third, behind and just ahead of the Gordon Elliott pair Delta Work and Galvin, both habitual competitors at the top level, as well as winner I Am Maximus. Last time out, he had given Vanillier, the 2023 runner-up 12lb and a 14-length beating in a four-runner Grade 3 chase at Fairyhouse.
I Am Maximus received 2lb from Nassalam on Saturday, but had the Grand National weight assessor had available evidence of Fairyhouse to hand, he would have been conceding 3lb to Nassalam. I think having seen him start at 50/1 and after making a couple of mistakes, yet still valiantly completed, the UK handicappers might start adjusting their reaction to what have been hitherto perceived as key races.
If in a 19-runner handicap like the Welsh National it is obvious that only a few horses handled conditions, a more measured approach might be in order. Horses like I Am Maximus, Delta Work (close to dual Grand National winner Tiger Roll more than once), Minella Indo and Galvin should not be receiving weight from a horse with a single performance that sticks out like a sore thumb.
Elsewhere, great credit must go to David Maxwell. Most 45-year-old estate agents would have been in the hospitality area if inclined to visit the Grand National. Instead, he bought Ain’t That A Shame, 105 lengths behind Corach Rambler in last year’s National under Rachael Blackmore and pulled up more recently in the Munster National and guided him into sixth place – and a £30k instalment on the purchase price - only 15.75 lengths adrift of I Am Maximus. Rachael, on the third Minella Indo, still had the edge in the Henry de Bromhead team, so a good piece of business all round.
Most interesting for me, having put forward one of J P McManus’s other runners, Limerick Lace, as my selection last week, it was a shock to see her price contract to 7/1 joint-favourite with the winner.
She finished tenth after making some mistakes, beginning when interfered with, as far as I could see on a single viewing, at the Canal Turn first time round. She was going on very well at the finish, and if she does come back next year, whatever happens in the meantime (almost) I’ll be with her.
Changing tack, something though has to be done about a situation where two trainers can know from months out they can share half the Grand National field between them without fear of serious challenge. This also prevents other potential candidates lower down the handicap scale – usually the best chance for one of ours – to get in. I do think a cap on the maximum number of runners for a trainer or owner, or both, might well need to be an interim measure before trainers here totally pull up the white flag.
Dan Skelton, Ben Pauling and a few others have stepped forward to bolster the long-established leaders Nicky Henderson and Paul Nicholls. Irishman Fergal O’Brien is well entrenched in Gloucestershire and all five of those talented men had winners over the three days last week.
In a way the £500,000 first prize, along with £200,000, £100,000 and £65,000 for the next three places does nothing for the race, except in enabling people to say it’s the biggest prize in UK jump racing. So what?! It’s our race and we need our top and highly skilled trainers and their owners to have a shot of winning it.
A first step would be to let owners know that the old antipathy against running in the race for fear of an early end to a jumper’s career is no longer valid. If it always gives an imbalance to the trainers' championship too, that’s a side effect. When Aidan O’Brien habitually contests the flat trainers' title with the Gosdens and others, he needs to win Classics and numerous Group 1 races to make up for the numerical advantage of his British counterparts. There’s no such balancing act in jumping – it’s Willie first, the rest nowhere!
On the point of non-runners, Gordon Elliott reduced his big team by one via a vet’s certificate, but Chambard, trained by Venetia William, was withdrawn on a self-certificate. For a normal race I would say the self-cert rule is fine, but for a race like the Grand National, surely not. For contests of a certain value and status, specific reasons should be required. Two horses were denied the chance to run for the big pot and I bet their connections are fuming!
- TS
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