The famous race continues to excite and excite in equal measure — let it continue. Photo: PA/David Davies
The Grand National will be a spectacular sight on Saturday and we hope the next generation across the country will enter the lotteries and fall in love with the race.
What they most likely won't realize is that the 4m2½f epic is now producing a winner rather than a hero, as it did in years past when the course was a much bigger issue. This is an observation, not a critique of the fencing changes imposed on the track, often by left-wing media and broadcasters.
The Guardian couldn't wait to publish headlines like «Killing the Field» when the meeting in Aintree was fatalities, whether they occurred on the Grand National fences or in the steeplechase.
And the BBC was not much better. While his racing teams, of which I have been a part for many years, were totally committed to the big race, their newsroom colleagues in London couldn't wait to get involved.
That's right. to say, however, that some race is better than no race. And so it would have been had the changes not been made.
In October 1990, I took Bocaro to Belmont Park, New York to run the Queen Mother Steeplechase. A day later, Morley Street won the Breeders' Cup Chase there with the same hurdles. It felt like a sham, but that's what we came up with with the Grand National.
After 2012, the core of the Grand National fences was changed from a medieval rampart-like structure with a rigid wooden frame at its core, to something very similar to the plastic barriers that Bokaro jumped in the US.
On top of the modified, lowered core, the fence builders lay spruce, which is easily scattered by the runners on the first lap, leaving nothing more than a plastic obstacle for the second jump.
This radically changes the nature of the race and the type of horse needed to win. So the days when it took a big old-fashioned chaser to win the Nationals are over.
The winning race times over the years bear this out. When Red Rum won the National in 1977, it took him 9 minutes and 30 seconds on good ground. But in 2012, when Neptune Collonge won with only two pounds less than Rummy, he was at home and lost at 9:05.
There are two reasons for this. First, horses can jump over small fences faster than large fences with energy-intensive cliffs behind them. And secondly, because the obstacles are much smaller, the field moves much faster than before at the beginning of the race.
Dan Skelton, coach of Le Milos, this year's main running enthusiast, expressed his opinion . finger on these items last week. He noted that these days it is more important to stay on every meter of the path than in the past, when it was believed that 2.5 miles was enough.
The logic was that since they rode much slower on the first lap to stay on their feet, more speed was needed on the second lap to win. More Aintree-type fences.
Some might think that the course was down one and a half furlongs in 2013, smaller fences and faster times would mean less endurance, not more. . However, the relentless gallop caused by the changes had the opposite effect, guaranteeing a relentless gallop from pole to pole.
All this makes picking a winner very difficult. If I'm right, the ante-post favorite, Korach Rambler, is too conventional to win, while we know last year's winner Noble Yates ticks all the current boxes and, as an eight-year-old, also seems to still be getting better.
Fortunately, all of the above are just details. Grand Nationals Day still generates the biggest sales of popular newspapers of the year, and the race is one of the biggest boosters to the local economy.
The glass of Grand Nationals is still half full.
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