In pics: Grand National action
High summer for the winter game: the blazing sunshine might have been more Ascot than Aintree, but the long desperate duel as Silver Birch held off McElvey up that ever stretching run-in was the authentic Grand National in the raw. As ever it was the battle that rewards the winner with history.
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Hard, hard Robbie Power drove; deep, deep Silver Birch stretched, but after him Tom O'Brien, another even younger Irishman, started to close him down. Nine minutes earlier both of them were merely hopefuls as the 40-strong field plunged at the starting line. But nine minutes of action at Aintree can shatter the framework of predictions like a herd of cattle thundering through a campsite. Power and O'Brien had steered a course through two circuits of galloping bedlam. And it had come to this.
Up till now 25-year-old Power has been better known as son of the Irish show jumping legend Con Power, but this crowing of four successful years as a professional jockey have given him a legend of his own. 20-year-old Tom O'Brien has the famous connection of having Aidan O'Brien as an uncle and this season is in the process of setting a new record for a conditional jump jockey in Britain.
The fact that this showdown was not the script that the world expected only reinforces the Grand National's strength. This is a place, a challenge, an experience like no other. Acres of newsprint can be used in predictions but it does not take long to shred them. The much- fancied Point Barrow had never fallen over fences in an already distinguished career. Yesterday he went at the first.
Out on the track the spectacle thrills and baffles by turn. We stood down at the Chair fence watching the big screen. Naunton Brook was making the running, Simon was up there, Bewleys Berry was attacking his fences with great gusto, Liberthine was running a big one, but so too was the grey Kandjar D'Allier and he did not have a jockey on him, he and Robert Thornton had turned over at Canal Turn.
The Grand National always has an element of dread and the thought that a loose horse might suddenly swerve and wipe out the leaders features high among them. Mercifully such drama was avoided as the pack came drumming towards us on the magnificently cushioned Aintree turf. They winged the Chair as only thoroughbreds can and as they set out on the second circuit, we began to wait for the big hitters to surge. We were to wait in vain.
True, Hedgehunter was called a little and Numbersixvalverde, too, but we had to start accepting that this National might not develop in the way that pundits had predicted. Some had hung a bit on Simon but he went out at the 25th and as the field came back towards the Anchor Bridge crossing we began to believe in stranger things. 33-1 Slim Pickings was up there with Silver Birch, who had started at similar odds and beside them was 100-1 shot Philson Run.
But the unexpected is the National's trademark. Liberthine and her amateur partner Sam Waley-Cohen were putting up a towering performance and still battling in there as Barry Geraghty had Slim Pickings ahead of Silver Birch at the second last. It now looked between these two but O'Brien and the well-backed McKelvey were on the roll to become the first Welsh-trained winner in over a hundred years. Unexpected perhaps but unexciting? Never.
Up the run-in Silver Birch took over and headed towards us at the dog-leg by the Chair fence. As he came past he was three lengths to the good and all O'Brien's strivings looked unlikely to crack what was to be the youngest National team's dream. Both owner Brian Walsh and trainer Gordon Elliott are in their twenties. Co Meath-based Elliott only began training last year. But he had primed his horse. Now he was only yards from immortality.
Silver Birch had won round these fences two season ago for Paul Nicholls, but a disappointing time last year had the master trainer putting him on the transfer list. The 20,000gns stud manager Walsh paid for him could be one of the bargains of the century. But he had to hang on first.
O'Brien was driving and McKelvey was closing but hanging out a little to the right. "I heard the commentator say another horse was coming," said Power afterwards, "but I just kept going." In the shadow of the post McKelvey made one last heroic lunge to get within three quarters of a length of the winner. So heroic that he pulled up so lame that he had to stand with the vets rather than walk back in glory. Even half an hour later poor O'Brien was almost too "gutted" to speak.
But then that is so often the way at the Grand National banquet. To the winner the jubilation but to the one that got so close, a sense of grasping "might have been" too deep for words.
Yesterday it was Robbie Power and Tom O'Brien who drank the cups.
WEBMASTER'S NOTE - I chose SLIM PICKINS which came 3rd - About Par for the course!!!
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