Aintree Grand National turns into publicity coup for fringe animal rights group

Corach Rambler will go down in history as winning the 175th Aintree Grand National but a fringe animal rights group will perhaps feel they secured their own biggest ‘result’ on Saturday.

In front of a 600 million global TV audience, and 70,000 people crammed into Aintree, the tiny Animal Rising group turned the world’s most famous steeplechase into about them and their desire to ban racing.

Whatever the rights and wrongs, and the trainer of the one fatality in the race still blames the disrupters for Hill Sixteen’s fall at the first, their impact was a publicity coup.

Delaying the National start by breaching security around Aintree’s two-mile long perimeter, and trying to attach themselves to a couple of the famous fences, resolutely thrust the famous race into a welfare spotlight once again.

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Long after most backers of the 8-1 favourite had finished counting their winnings, Merseyside police were processing 118 arrests and a postmortem was well under way into the circumstances around such logistical carnage.

On Sunday, the RSPCA called on the British Horseracing Authority to review the circumstances of the trio of equine fatalities over the three-day Aintree festival.

Earlier on Saturday’s card, Willie Mullins’s Dark Raven had to be put down after falling in a hurdle race. Enveoye Special was put down after a fall over the National fences on Thursday. Hill Sixteen was the fifth horse to sustain fatal injuries in the National since 2019. A total of 17 of the 39 National runners finished.

The RSPCA’s “urgent” review call to the BHA specified that a racing festival should never again finish with three dead horses and is a demand that cuts to the PR element generated by Saturday’s scenes.

Demands for such guarantees are impossible to deliver. Jump racing’s essential challenge ensures that. Even the extensive modifications to the National fences over the last decade can’t remove risk. Horses can sustain serious injuries in a field, never mind racing over obstacles.

On Sunday the BHA said racing’s mortality rate has reduced by over a third in the last two decades to 0.2 per cent of runners.

However, the National’s public appeal, so vital to the sport’s profile, also means popular judgements get made on the back of just 10 minutes of action.

If Saturday’s protesters got what they wanted in spades on Saturday – and not surprisingly buoyed by that success, they pledged it was just the start of their campaign – it may not have been cost-free.

Hill Sixteen’s Scottish trainer Sandy Thomson pointed to the chaotic pre-race delay as a reason for his usually sure-footed runner falling at the first. He had never fallen in 26 previous races, including twice around Aintree.

He was one of a handful of horses – including Davy Russell’s mount Galvin – to exit at the first.

Immediately afterwards Thomson said: “He just hasn’t taken off at the first fence; he’s got so bloody hyper because of the carry on”.

On Sunday he stood by those comments.

“I read somewhere that it has been nine years since the fences have been modified and there had been an average of two fallers at the first two fences in those nine years, and yesterday there were eight.

“I think horses got very wound up and, oddly, not having a parade didn’t help the situation. The jockeys get on the horse and then they have got to parade before going on to the course, to settle them down,” Thomson said.

As for the protesters, and animal rights bodies generally, he added: “If they really want to deal with animal welfare, they need to sort out where there is real cruelty and the RSPCA will tell you where it is, but they don’t want to hear it – they don’t want to be educated”.

It was unfair on Lucinda Russell, the Scottish trainer who actually won the National, that her second victory in the race to go with One For Arthur in 2017, wound up competing for the spotlight.

Corach Rambler and his Sligo-born jockey Derek Fox ultimately won with real authority as half a dozen Irish challengers led by Vanillier vainly chased him home on the run-in.

Fox, 30, who also rode One For Arthur, had to pass the doctor to ride on Saturday after sustaining a shoulder injury the previous week.

A day later the team based between Edinburgh and Perth were basking in their glory but aware too of the unfortunate wider context.

“I just say to all the protesters, come and see how the horses are kept. I came from a non-racing background, and I can assure you that welfare in other horse sports is not as high as it is in racing,” Russell said.

“I understand they [protestors] get very excited about it, but for the welfare of horses they should be looking at a wider picture,” she added.

Different perspectives though can be accompanied by different agendas.