by Robin Oakley
So too did the punters who had backed Don’t Push It all the way down from 25-1 to 10-1 favourite. That didn’t happen because of anything in the horse’s form. Only one horse in the previous 25 years had carried more than eleven stone to victory and Don’t Push It carried 11st 5lb. Only seven of the previous 50 favourites had won and although he had a touch of class, Don’t Push It was a quirky, unsociable individual who spent most of his time out in a field with sheep and never ran two races alike. The money was there for him simply because AP is a riding phenomenon, the champion for eighteen consecutive years in a sport in which simply keeping your body roughly in one piece for a full season is an achievement.
AP is utterly professional, totally dedicated to winning and afraid of nothing. At the Cheltenham Festival that year his body had taken a terrible battering in two crunching falls. But that didn’t stop him riding the winner of the Champion Hurdle, bringing Denman home second in the Gold Cup and riding a race on Alberta’s Run in the Ryanair Chase which was both a masterpiece of tactical riding and a testament to his gritty determination.
For racing folk AP’s victory at Aintree was all the sweeter because it was achieved in conjunction with two others who had also seemed to suffer a National hoodoo. Don’t Push It’s owner J.P. McManus, the greatest patron jump racing has ever had (and a man who looks after all his old horses after their racing days are done), had unsuccessfully run 44 horses before Don’t Push It in his bid to win the race. Trainer Jonjo O’Neill, another great jockey in his time, never got round the National course as a rider and had yet to prepare a horse to win it.
When McCoy stood up in his stirrups after the line and waved his whip in triumph, the crowds erupted in one of the biggest public thank yous and instinctive salutes to greatness that I have witnessed. McCoy is famously unemotional. Tears, previously, had only been permitted in private, as when he sat alone in the weighing room shattered by the death of his young mount Gloria Victis at Cheltenham. This time they were out in the open as he acknowledged that many folk would have been unaware of his successes in Gold Cups and Champion Hurdles but that winning the people’s race had wiped out what he saw as the negative on his CV: ‘Everyone knows about the National so from a public point of view, to win the biggest race in the world means everything. At least now I can feel I’ve done all right.’
The nation followed up by voting AP BBC Sports Personality of the year, the first man from his sport ever to win that accolade, and if ever there was a people’s champion in the people’s race, he was it.
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A question that has always intrigued me is whether there is a ‘National type’ of racehorse that would make winner-spotting any easier. Certainly there are horses like Red Rum, L’Escargot, Hedgehunter and State of Play who have consistently run well at Aintree. I have talked about it with owners and jockeys over the years.
Bob Davies, who picked up a chance ride on Lucius in 1978 when Dave Goulding was injured and won the race, believes that the best sorts for the National were horses like him, two-and-a-half mile chasers that could just about get three miles. He put past winners Specify and Gay Trip in that category too. ‘It depends on the going but normally in a dryish spring the ground is reasonable at Aintree and you need that bit of speed.’ It is only when it is heavy at Aintree, he contended, that chances improved for the kind of dour stayers who would slog round soggy Chepstow to take a Welsh National. While most would think of Red Rum as an extreme stayer, Davies, long-time clerk of the course at Ludlow, pointed out that he contested five-furlong sprints as a two-year-old.
Josh Gifford, who came second to Foinavon in 1967 on Honey End after the 23rd fence fiasco, and later trained Aldaniti to win, didn’t agree that there was any National ‘type’. ‘They come in all shapes and sizes and have been winning over every sort of trip,’ he said. ‘What you need above all is a horse with the right temperament who jumps the right way and a bloody lot of luck.’ Aldaniti, he said, was a stayer and nothing else.
Jenny Pitman, who won with Corbiere in 1983 and Royal Athlete in 1995 as well as taking the void race in 1993 with Esha Ness agreed that Fred Winter favoured two-and-a-half mile horses for the National, but those were not the kind she won with in days when the fences were stiffer than now:
Corbiere was never the fastest but he was a brilliant jumper. He flew over them and gained a length or two at every fence. Royal Athlete jumped well too. What you need above all is a good jumper and a horse that is well balanced. There are a lot of fences to be jumped at Aintree and a horse needs to be confident. It’s guts. I watched a television programme about the training of athletes the other day and the coach said that a number of athletes came to him with similar abilities but the ones who became champions were the ones with strong characters. Champions are the ones who will grind it down.
No wonder McCoy got his National victory in the end.
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For their sheer fortitude I have come to admire the girls of Merseyside who year after year whoop it up at the National and on Ladies Day on the Friday. The year 2005 when Hedgehunter won and Carrie Ford rode Forest Gunner, prompting Ginger McCain’s less than gallant comments, was typical. It was both wet and windy. Umbrellas turned inside out, racecards disintegrated into a sodden pulp and rain seeped down inside your collar. But everywhere you turned there were the she-packs in their wispy little fragments of silk and lace, enough sun-tanned bare midriffs on display to have risked a meltdown of the National Grid through the week before and heels so mountainous that you could have picked apples without a stepladder in them. Colour didn’t seem to matter so long as it was vivid. I was myself wearing a rather natty pair of orange/tan cords and when one young lady dressed in little more than a baby doll nightie declared ‘Nice trousers. We could have them off of youse’ I wasn’t quite sure whether it was compliment or threat. Either way I fled. But the crucial thing was that while they were dressed more appropriately for a disco dance floor than an arctic blast, they never stopped enjoying themselves.
I like to think that if Carrie Ford had won that year the Merseyside girls would have cheered it as a great stride forward for womanhood. But, truth be told, most of them wouldn’t have noticed if a Martian had been riding the winner, especially not the ones who were drinking their pink champagne from pint mugs.
Ginger, who had threatened to bare his backside to the elements if a woman won, hedged his bets by presenting Carrie Ford with a bunch of flowers earlier. But they may only have been on loan. The bunch that appeared later in the McCain family’s name on Red Rum’s grave beside the winning post looked remarkably similar.
I have got into the habit of paying my tribute to the old boy there each year before walking the course (Red Rum that is, not Ginger, though I guess he is now included) and if you have never been to a National I do advise arriving early enough to do so. They stoke the atmosphere up brilliantly at Aintree with bands and entertainers. One year recently I had to fling myself out of the way of a chap in a nun’s outfit who flashed past playing boogie-woogie on a motorised piano. So I go out on to the course to remind myself that in the end it is all about jumping and to look once more at just how big the obstacles still are. Even the open ditches with their sloping spruce fronts require horse and jockey to clear an obstacle 5ft 6ins high and 10ft 6ins wide from the sighting board to the turf on the other side and I think of Mattie Batchelor’s comment after his first round over the Aintree fences. ‘People talk about Becher’s,’ he said, ‘but The Chair is massive. I’m only a little guy and it looked like a block of flats to me.’ But of course we all have our perspectives on danger. John Oaksey did a memorable TV piece once flying over the Aintree fences in a helicopter to help illustrate how it felt to ride in the race. He kept urging the pilot to fly lower until finally the exasperated man told him, ‘If one of your bloody horses hits an obstacle you’ll be carried away in a nice comfortable ambulance. If we touch one they’ll scrape us up with a trowel!’
I cannot look at Becher’s without remembering Crisp, out on his own, soaring over it imperiously as if it was a child’s toy, and thanks to historian Chris Pitt I will never pass the 23rd, the Foinavon fence as it has been known since the carnage in 1967, without thinking of Johnny Leech, who had remounted and carried on, and who suddenly asked himself, ‘Am I on the right horse?’
There really is no race like it.
Epsom days
When I moved from Liverpool to London as my working base my horizons expanded from Merseyside trainers to the likes of Brian Swift, Jackie Sirett, Tommy Gosling, Cyril Mitchell, Harold Wallington and John Benstead, not to mention the Reigate veteran Jack O’Donoghue, who had trained Nickel Coin, a mare bought for just 55 guineas, to win the Grand National in 1951. I remember being horrified when he told me that he only had ten shillings each way on her.
The soft-voiced man from County Cork had a stable set among the poplars of Priory Park where jumpers and Flat horses shared the space with donkeys, ponies and three-day eventers, not to mention golden pheasants and a sheep called Sam who could jump a five-foot wall. Jack trained for, among others, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. An old-school horseman, he was insistent on the need for horses to be taught to jump properly and he put them over every kind of graduated obstacle. He didn’t have that many stars but you didn’t see O’Donoghue horses crashing down hurdles in those juvenile cavalry charges as if they were going ten-pin bowling.
It must have been after visiting him and one or two more of the old school that I wrote a rather grumpy piece I found in my cuttings from 1966. Flat owners were sending poor quality horses hurdling, I complained, without proper preparation in the hope of picking up some consolation prize money after failure on the Flat and it was ruining racing as a spectacle. Racecourse executives were conniving and not staging enough steeplechases.
Poorly schooled novice hurdlers of doubtful quality, packed together in formless fields of twenty or more will not attract the public to racecourses: it’s the chasers they want to see and it is the chasers who provide a far more satisfactory betting medium.
Under the rules of National Hunt racing the course executives only have to provide two chases on a day’s card and they can’t be blamed for not exceeding their minimum. There is a dearth of good young chasers since owners are too concerned with a quick return and insist on sending young horses hurdling before they have developed their strength. Of course some make the transition at a later stage but many a young horse is ruined by premature hurdling and will not take to the bigger obstacles.
It has reached the stage where it is ridiculous to describe National Hunt racing in general as ‘jumping’. Fewer and fewer horses are actually jumping anything and hurdling has more in common with circus dodgems than with show ring equestrianism … What we want, and soon, is tougher hurdles, public cautions for trainers sending out unschooled animals (often permit holders with no experienced work riders to do the job) and financial incentives for owners to keep their horses for chasing. Half the money awarded in prizes on a National Hunt course must be for chases. I would suggest making this proportion two thirds …
A distinctive figure on the Epsom Downs when I was jogging or dog-walking in the early morning was Reg Akehurst, another like Eric Cousins who relished picking up top handicaps. Understandably he didn’t give much away in casual conversation but when I visited him for a stable feature I remember his delightful wife Sheila confiding a lesser ambition. As a jockey Reg had won the Royal Worcester Porcelain Chase and the coffee service that went to the winning rider. She now wanted him to train the winner of the same race so she got the tea service to match.
At that time – the late 1960s – Cyril Mitchell was training from the stables in the centre of the Downs and then had in his care Peter O’Sullevan’s wonderful sprinter Be Friendly. It hadn’t always been so easy. I remember him telling me with a typical chuckle, ‘I started with seven horses and after a year’s struggle I soon got that down to two.’ Appropriately after such an unpromising start, his first winner was called Stitch In Time.
Cyril’s son Philip was then the leading amateur rider, prior to the commencement of his own training career. Although there have been some rows along the way, he pays tribute to his father’s precious ability to rekindle horses’ enthusiasm. Cyril Mitchell, says Philip, planted one essential silicon chip in his brain: ‘Any fool can get them fit but you must have them mentally happy and enjoying their racing.’ To me Cyril defined the trainer’s task as ‘not screwing up the good ones’.
Nearly 30 years later in July 1997 I was back at Downs House talking through the cycles of a trainer’s life with the ever-amiable Philip. He then had a good one in the shape of Running Stag, whom he placed cleverly to win stacks of money racing abroad. The piece I wrote then started around the Mitchell family breakfast table overlooking the yard: ‘Freddie was alarmed his stick insect might have died and had to be assured it was merely dormant, Jack had helped himself to enough breakfast cereal to feed both the family Alsatians …’ Racing is often dynastic: look at the Nicholson or Hills families. Now Philip has moved to train in Lambourn and both Jack and Freddie are upwardly mobile jockeys. It really is in the genes.
I always remember that day talking about Philip’s Lincoln winner King’s Glory. Bought like most of his at that time from Newmarket sales (‘Go to Ireland and they see you coming and add a nought’), the horse had lost his confidence at racing’s headquarters. A stable lass asked if she could go into the box to fetch him and it was, says Philip, love at first sight: ‘They had an affair. The horse would call out to her every day when she came into the yard. It sounds silly but it was like a romance. The more they stayed together the more he blossomed.’ Any logical person has to have his doubts about such anthropomorphism. But Henry Cecil used to say he talked to his horses and they were his best friends. If the trainer of 25 Classic winners says that, who are we mere scribblers to affect scepticism?
Sometimes I would gain an insight too into the jockeys who came down to ride the horses from those Epsom yards. I found a note from the 1970s of a conversation with John Benstead, a fine trainer of stayers. He regularly used Australian jockey Scobie Breasley who later came to train just up the road from us in Reg Akehurst’s former yard. Benstead said he never gave Scobie orders after he had ridden a horse once, and he praised him for getting the utmost out of a horse without any apparent effort:
Sometimes when it looks as though Scobie has won a race with an awful lot in hand the horse is at his last gasp. He’s won races for me leading all the way when I would have preferred him to wait and the other way around. He may make it look easy but when Scobie has ridden a horse it has had a race.
Jockeys, of course, are not allowed to bet and many years later when I was for a while a member of Epsom’s race committee helping to entertain connections after their successes on the course I was told of the colleague who approached Mrs May Breasley and congratulated her on a decent-priced winner from the yard. ‘I expect your husband had a nice touch on that,’ he said. ‘Oh no,’ she exclaimed, ‘Scobie hasn’t had a bet since he gave up riding!’
* * *
When I left the Liverpool Post to join the Sunday Express as ‘Crossbencher’ in the late 1960s my writing about racing came to a temporary end and it was not until 1995 when Frank Johnson as editor of the Spectator asked me to write the Turf column there that I began doing so on a regular basis again.
I was still based in Epsom and so was Reg Akehurst, now with 63 boxes full in Burgh Heath Road, a few hundred yards from where I lived. I used to love going up on the Downs in the early morning with the racing strings stark against the skyline as they passed along the ridge, and I was soon noting:
At the centre of Epsom Downs most days, at the top of the sandhill track you’ll find the weathered figure of Reg Akehurst with his ever-attendant Alsatians Terry and Kally. As his experienced eye runs over the cir
cling string, you’ll be looking at probably the best trainer of handicappers in Britain, a man with the secret of rejuvenating horses which others have discarded. He is also a man not unknown to take a tilt at the bookies.
Reg is no lover of cold weather. He has taken a winter spell in Barbados for the past eighteen years and sometimes he does so with a little help from the ring. Just before his January holiday this year his Ballynakelly, a big ex-Irish import who had previously shown little on turf came out on the all-weather track at Lingfield. Backed down from 8-1 to 5-2 favourite he romped home, apprentice-ridden, by ten lengths. I asked Reg if that had paid the holiday expenses. ‘It helped.’
He didn’t win the Lincoln this year with the favourite Sharp Prospect but he’s won it before. In the years since he gave up a 12-year career as a jump jockey he has sent out the winner of most other big handicaps too. He does well typically with older handicappers, well-bred types from Classic stables which he has bought at the Newmarket sales. Someone once described the unrelenting openness of the Newmarket landscape as ‘miles and miles of bugger all’ and although Reg Akehurst is a great admirer of Newmarket’s facilities, he has a knack of taking Newmarket horses and rekindling their enthusiasm. ‘Horses relax and do well here,’ he says of Epsom. ‘They like the downland gradients and the varied scenery.’
As for his reputation for cannily placing his horses when they do start improving, he insists, ‘You don’t have to cheat to win races. You know when a horse has come right and if you’ve got a horse you can win with, you want it to win. It’s your calling card.’
Sometimes people read too much into the planning of an imagined coup. A summer ago his grey Silver Groom was running in the ‘Hong Kong’ at Sandown. They had been expecting a good run but jockey Jimmy Quinn found himself behind a wall of horses when he went to challenge. He reported back to the trainer, ‘I had so much horse under me, but I just couldn’t get through’ so they aimed Silver Groom next for the William Hill Cup at Goodwood. By the time of the race the Akehursts had gone off with son Murray for his wedding in Barbados. They all piled into a Bridgetown betting shop, put some real money down and whooped home the winner. The bridegroom did so well, says Reg, that he even tipped the vicar.