How to back the right horse: top tips for the Grand National

Around £250 million was placed in bets on the 2019 Grand National, and this Saturday’s Grand National, which will be shown live on ITV at 5.15pm, looks set to be equally popular.

Cloth Cap, they say, ‘should win it’. Trained by Jonjo O’Neill, he has a stone in hand carrying 10st 5 – which is one of the reasons why he’ll be ridden by Tom Scudamore, who picked up the ride in the Ladbrokes Trophy at Newbury due to being able to make the 10 stone weight. He won easily. The pair went on to romp up at Kelso as well; but what would make this a nice tale is that both the jockey and the horse have Grand National heritage behind them. Scudamore’s grandfather Michael rode in the race 16 times, winning in 1959 on Oxo. The horse is owned by another Aintree aficionado Trevor Hemmings, whose famous green, yellow and white colours have previously won the National with Hedgehunter, Ballabriggs and Many Clouds.

The betting currently has him as the favourite, with Kimberlite Candy also proving popular with the tipsters. But with 40 horses due to jump off at the start, how often does the favourite actually win the Grand National? According to the stats (analysed by bookmakers BetVictor) a favourite or joint-favourite has won the National just eight times; since 1968 the favourite accounts for just 16 per cent of winners.

Of those, four have been in the 21^st century - Hedgehunter (2005), Comply or Die (2008), Don't Push It (2010), and 2019’s winner himself; Tiger Roll – who disappointed his fans in the Betway Bowl Chase at Aintree on Thursday, after making a surprising comeback in the Glenfarclas Cross Country race at Cheltenham in March.

Fourth here in 2018 and fifth in 2019, Anibale Fly knows the course well – as do a number of others who were here for the 2019 Grand National. This includes Magic of Light, who finished second to Tiger Roll in 2019 and, if she pulled it off, would be the first mare to win the race for 70 years. Ballyoptic (who fell four from home in 2019) is also back for another go, as is Lake View Lad (pulled up in 2019). Others like Definitly Red have been round these fences before too – he was unlucky in the 2017 Grand National, but finished 4^th in the Becher Chase over the National fences in December 2019.

Last year, of course, the race was cancelled due to Covid. Instead ITV showed the surprisingly popular ‘Virtual Grand National’; a CGI version of the race which uses algorithms to create a virtual race that presenter Nick Luck believes has “a pretty good record of predicting which horses were likely to be in the firing line”.

The 2020 virtual version was won by Potters Corner – a Welsh-trained horse who is ‘coming back’ this year with hopes of retaining his crown; though this year he may have to work slightly harder – last year he didn’t even have to turn up, after all! On Thursday he was at 20/1.

It is often an outsider who comes up and surprises us and who knows, that could happen on Saturday, too. One of three girls scheduled to ride on Saturday alongside the more famous Bryony Frost and Rachael Blackmore, Tabitha Worsley will be riding Sub Lieutenant – trained and owned by her mother. As she puts it herself: “Even if you’re a rank outsider, if you get the right run through the race and a bit of luck, anyone can win”, and Worsley has form, having won the Foxhunter’s (a race over the Grand National course for Amateur riders) in 2019 on Top Wood.

It was another outsider who made history 40 years ago, when Aldaniti won the race with Bob Champion aboard. It’s often said that racing is full of fairytales, and their story is certainly one of them. In 1979, the pair came third in the Cheltenham Gold Cup and second in the Scottish Grand National; but that summer Bob was diagnosed with testicular cancer, at the height of his career. It was spreading through his body, and he needed chemotherapy to have any chance of beating it. When, in November 1979, Aldaniti injured his leg badly at Sandown, Bob is reported to have declared “The horse is finished, I’m finished, that’s it”.

But that was far from it. The Embiricos family, who owned Aldaniti, were determined to get the horse well again. He had his leg in plaster for six months, while Bob underwent gruelling chemo, having been given a 30 per cent chance of survival. Against the odds the pair came back, winning at Ascot in February 1981, before triumphing in the 1981 Grand National. The whole story is immortalised in the film ‘Champions’, starring John Hurt as Champion (and Aldaniti as himself!).

Retiring the next year, since then Bob has devoted his life to fundraising for the Bob Champion Cancer Trust, raising over £15 million for cancer research and receiving a CBE for services to prostate and testicular cancer research in the 2020 New Year’s Honours. He even took part in ITV’s ‘Real Full Monty on Ice’ to raise awareness about cancer – a programme which does what it says on the tin, really.

To celebrate the 40^th anniversary of their Grand National win, Bob Champion will walk 191 miles, marking the 191 days between his diagnosis in July 1979 and getting the all-clear in January 1980. The walk will cover 40 stops all connected to his life – many of them racing yards – starting with a walk around Aintree on Sunday and finishing at Findon in West Sussex, where Aldaniti was trained by Josh Gifford. Aldaniti perfectly embodies the Grand National spirit - the notion that, with enough grit, the race can be blown wide open.