The unforgettable Red Rum

Have you ever been on the course or even in a bookie’s when one of the great steeplechases begins? The roar of anticipation, the sighs when one of the favourites falls, the frenzy of the last quarter-mile? These great races — the Cheltenham Gold Cup, the King George, the Whitbread, the Hennessy — last three miles or more: long enough for a complex story to unfold, for a horse to demonstrate skill, tenacity and courage, for a race to be won and lost half a dozen times. And then, standing alone, there is the Grand National (the “Grand” is superfluous; “the National” is enough the world over): four and a half miles, 30 frightening fences, up to 40 brave horses, a large crowd to will them on, a vast audience of once-a-year punters shouting the odds.

We have had some great steeplechasing heroes: Golden Miller, winner of five Cheltenham Gold Cups as well as the National in 1934; Arkle, winner of three successive Gold Cups; Desert Orchid, a striking grey horse adored by the public and winner of four King Georges and a Gold Cup. Golden Miller and Arkle were supreme performers; “Dessie” a people’s champion. But one horse managed both to set a new standard and to capture the heart of a nation. The horse was Red Rum, and he did it because his domain was Aintree, the Liverpool home of the National since 1836.

Red Rum is the only horse to have won the National three times — in 1973, 1974 and 1977. Six horses had won it twice before Red Rum, but the double had not been achieved since Reynoldstown in 1935/36. Even the great Golden Miller won only once in five attempts; Arkle never confronted the Aintree monster. To win back-to-back Nationals in 1973/74 was remarkable; to come back in 1977 at the age of 12 and win again was little short of miraculous. In between those triumphs, Red Rum had been second in 1975, giving 11lb to the brilliant L’Escargot, and second again in 1976, giving 12lb to Rag Trade. The main reason that multiple winners of the National are rare is not that, having won once, they anxiously come back knowing Becher’s Brook has to be jumped twice. It is that once a horse wins, it is thenceforth less favourably weighted. Red Rum was always top weight after his win in 1973.

That record-breaking third victory is now a generation away and “Rummie” died in 1995 aged 30, veteran of five Nationals and several thousand supermarket openings (he also turned on the Blackpool illuminations and was a star turn at the Sports Personality of the Year Awards; had it been open to quadrupeds, he would undoubtedly have won). Over time, memories fade: Golden Miller is a name known now only to the racing cognoscenti. A recitation of races won cannot capture the essence of a great horse; that resides in the hearts of those who witnessed his deeds. The peerless sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney saw each of Red Rum’s assaults on the Everest of steeplechasing and, in an article written a year after his third Aintree victory, explained what the horse meant: “In animal-loving Britain, no animal has ever been loved like this one. His hold on the affections of the nation utterly transcends racing. Schoolboys and grandmothers, turf aficionados and once-a-year 50-pence punters cherish him for reasons more compelling than his brilliance. They love him because he is a classic hero figure, because he rose from the harshest of working-class backgrounds and travelled the stoniest of roads to stardom, and because he made it on his ability, his smartness, his resilience, and most of all on the burning purity of his spirit.”

Red Rum hailed from a stud in Ireland and there was little in his background to suggest that he was a legend in the making. His mother (or dam, in racing parlance) was too temperamental to be any good on the racecourse; his sire noted chiefly for his speed in sprints. Four and a half miles would have been unthinkable for either, and the two-year-old Rummie made his debut in a low-grade flat race over five furlongs. The runes, though, were there to be read: amazingly, that first race was at Liverpool and he dead-heated with a horse called Curlicue. Not that anyone was reading them just yet: he passed through several sets of hands, had four different trainers and in his 10-year-career was ridden by no fewer than 24 jockeys, including Lester Piggott. His flat career was exactly that — flat. But all that changed when in August 1972 he was bought by the wealthy octogenarian Noel Le Mare, who had set his heart on winning the National, and placed in the hands of Donald (aka “Ginger”) McCain, a former taxi-driver who ran a small stables at the back of a second-hand car dealer’s showroom in Southport.

In flat racing, the great prizes usually go to multi-million-pound operations and trainers with large complexes at Newmarket. In jump racing, everything is scaled down: any owner can get a realistic shot at the major races, and the only complex McCain had before he happened on Red Rum was how to pay the bills every month. Flat racing is science: breeding plus money equals success. Jump racing is art: poetry in motion. Red Rum was an average flat horse with dodgy feet, but something remarkable occurred when McCain took on the seven-year-old and started exercising him on the sands at Southport: the sea did wonders for his feet (he had been diagnosed as having a progressive bone disease called pedal ostitis) and in his first season with McCain he won six of his nine races, culminating in his first National.

Curiously, Red Rum was the villain of that race, getting up in the closing strides to beat the bold, front-running Crisp, who was conceding almost two stone to his rival. There are many contenders for “greatest National”, but that 1973 epic, with Red Rum making up 20 lengths on the run-in, is one of the unquestionable classics. Villain turned hero when he saw off Gold Cup winner L’Escargot in 1974, and followed that with those brave, top-weighted seconds. Then came 1977, when the only real threats came from two loose horses running alongside him, and from an ecstatic crowd spilling on to the course as he approached the finishing line. Brian Fletcher, who had ridden Red Rum to his first two National successes, had given way to the Irishman Tommy Stack by 1977. Stack, in tears as he was led to the winner’s enclosure, said the horse gave its jockey an enormous feeling of confidence, seeming to say “this is my place, this is my race”.

When Rummie won his first National in 1973, ownership of the course was about to change hands and the very survival of the event was in doubt; when he won his third in 1977 (he was entered for the next three but, perhaps thankfully, injury kept him out), its future was almost secure. The National had made Red Rum; and he in turn did his bit in re-establishing the National. When Red Rum died in October 1995, it is said that he received more column inches than Kingsley Amis and Alec Douglas-Home. What are novelists and prime ministers compared with a once-in-a-lifetime racehorse? Red Rum was buried at Aintree with his proud head facing the winning post: ready to fly past it and accept the applause of a doting crowd.

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