Self-Inflicted National Injury

There’s irony in how years of effort to make the Grand National safer has resulted in racing’s great shop-window being potentially more lethal than ever before. Everyone knows that speed is the great danger in steeplechasing. Even the ropiest jumper will manage to clamber over an obstacle if given enough time. But Aintree’s great self-inflicted injury is that no such luxury will be available on Saturday.

It’s a very different Grand National now to what most of us were weaned on. And in many ways that’s a good thing. It’s a positive that there is now a maximum field of runners, just as it is a positive that the class of horse in the race has improved. And the worst examples of drops at the back of fences were unfair. But here’s the thing – those removed factors were vital to the original Aintree attraction.

Central to the Grand National is the lottery element, the sense that no matter what price a horse was, it had a chance because you never knew what might happen: cue film of Foinavon etc. And that lottery element revolved around fallers. There’s no nice way of saying that, except to just say it. If the National is about anything in terms of perception by the general public, it is about fallers. And when horses fall, they hurt themselves, sometimes fatally.

So in recent decades the spotlight has centred on the fences and their severity, with the result that last year the old wooden stakes at the heart of the fences were mostly removed in favour of a more pliable plastic core. And sure enough horses survived mistakes that in the past they wouldn’t. And the overall outcome was damn near perfect with no fatalities, no high-profile incidents, and a 66-1 winner that maintained the National’s lottery image without any negative headlines.

But on the back of 2013 could come some sobering realities, the most important of which is another apparent irony in that the longest race on the calendar is increasingly now all about speed.

And over jumps it is speed that kills. It might seem contradictory, and it is certainly a hard-sell to the general public, but a valid argument can be made whereby making the fences stiffer actually makes the race safer. But what we have now is a better standard of horse able to go quicker for longer over fences that, rightly or wrongly, are perceived to be less of a threat, thus encouraging jockeys to go even quicker again.

In many ways it’s a perfect storm of valid and well-meaning intentions blowing back in everyone’s faces. It is certainly one which appears to leave no one very happy. Traditionalists already dismiss the National as only a pale imitation of what it once was. But what happens when horses are killed in the race despite the sport having turned itself inside out in its attempts to make the National more acceptable to a squeamish public that only focuses in once a year?

And the word to use is ‘when.’ To avoid that inevitability is to be dishonest, especially when so much that is catastrophic can happen to any horse in any race, never mind the National. And racing has to be able to justify itself to those same once-a-year viewers when that happens.

Many of the changes to the National down the years were positive. But diluting the jumping challenge from the fences is a wrong move. It is counter-productive because it goes against the grain of racing professionals who instinctively know it is speed that is the great enemy over fences, not the fences themselves. But that instinct has been ignored in favour of fiddling that panders to a cosmetic press-release culture. Racing should trust itself more on this. If it can justify the race, then it can justify the challenge, and for the good of everyone, particularly the horses and jockeys, that challenge should be primarily a jumping one.

Enthralled were you by the Dubai World Cup meeting? No, didn’t think so. It’s a curiously anodyne experience. Maybe it’s coming in the middle of the National Hunt festival season but there’s a disengagement to it that isn’t totally explained by the freakish nature of some of the results over the years.

Of all the performances on the night, the most impressive looked to be Gentildonna in the Sheema Classic. The dual-Japan Cup winner had so much go wrong for her in the straight and yet comprehensively outpointed Cirrus Des Aigles. If she travels for Europe’s top races this year she will be a danger to everything.

But in the longer-term surely the most significant step from Meydan was the fifty per cent purchase of Ruler Of The World from Coolmore by Sheikh Joann Al Thani’s Al Shaqab operation. The Qatari has fast become one of the most significant figures in world racing and the prospect of increased links to Coolmore must be one to keep every other bloodstock outfit awake at night.

It is certainly a long way removed from the adolescent peeing competition that Sheikh Mohammed has indulged in with Coolmore over the last decade. But don’t forget Dubai’s ruler and John Magnier once presented a buddy-buddy face to the world too back in the day – Imperial Falcon anyone? Things change.

Minds do too. Philip Enright quickly changed his last week when eventually deciding not to appeal that two-day careless riding ban at Downpatrick on Unoccupied. I can’t imagine too many told him to persevere. So what was he thinking in the first place?