The 1967 Grand National was won by a horse whose owner did not bother going to Aintree, whose trainer chose to spend the afternoon riding at Worcester instead, and whose price of 100/1 fairly reflected informed opinion. Foinavon won the world's most famous steeplechase for the most backhanded reason in the history of sport: he was so far behind the field that when catastrophe struck, he alone had time to avoid it.
The horse's pedigree contained one glorious irony. Foinavon had originally been owned by Anne, Duchess of Westminster, who named her horses after Scottish mountains — including a rather more successful one called Arkle, the greatest steeplechaser who ever lived. Foinavon showed so little ability and so much clumsiness that the Duchess sold him. He passed to owner Cyril Watkins and the small yard of trainer John Kempton, where he lived a companionable life alongside a white goat named Susie who travelled with him to the races. Kempton usually rode Foinavon himself in races, but couldn't make the weight at Aintree; on National day he was at Worcester, where he won a selling hurdle, while the ride went to John Buckingham, a 26-year-old who had never before ridden in the National.
Chaos at the twenty-third
Forty-four runners set off that April afternoon over the National's four and a half miles and thirty fences, and for a circuit and a half the race was entirely unremarkable. The fence after Becher's Brook is the smallest on the Grand National course, a mere 4ft 6in of thorn. On the second circuit — where it counts as the 23rd — it produced the most extraordinary pile-up jump racing has seen. A loose, riderless horse called Popham Down, which had unseated its jockey at the first fence but kept galloping with the leaders, suddenly veered right along the face of the fence just as the field arrived. The leaders were knocked sideways or stopped dead; the horses behind piled into them. Within seconds the fence was a barricade of refusing, milling and riderless horses, with jockeys scrambling in the ditch and remounting where they could. Effectively the entire race stopped.
All except one part of it. Foinavon was toiling along so far in arrears — estimates say some thirty lengths off the melee — that Buckingham could see the disaster assembling in time to do something about it. He steered wide to the outside, found a few feet of jumpable fence, and popped over at a near-standstill. On landing, a 100/1 outsider led the Grand National by a hundred yards. Behind him, seventeen jockeys remounted or found their horses and set off in furious pursuit — most notably Josh Gifford on the well-backed favourite Honey End, who had to return, rejump the fence and give chase over the final seven obstacles. Honey End made up enormous ground but ran out of racecourse: Foinavon held on by 15 lengths. Bookmakers, it was said, could hardly stop laughing as they kept the money; the BBC's commentator at that fence, Michael O'Hehir, delivered a famously unflustered call, picking Foinavon's colours out of the chaos as he slipped through.
An honest winner, in the end
The easy version of the story — hopeless nag flukes race — needed correcting even at the time, and the correction is the nice part. Foinavon still had to jump the last seven fences of the most demanding course in the world with a wall of pursuers closing, and he did so without touching a twig. Racing people also pointed out that every horse in the field had the same fence to negotiate; only one of them managed it at the first attempt. Buckingham, who had entered the weighing room that morning an anonymous journeyman, left it a permanent part of National folklore; he later became a respected jockeys' valet at the big meetings for decades. Foinavon himself ran in the next year's National and was brought down — at, of all places, the water jump. In 1984 Aintree formally named the little fence after Becher's the Foinavon fence, making him one of only two horses honoured on the course map. The other name on it is Becher, a fallen jockey. Foinavon's fence commemorates something rarer: the day the race fell over, and the slowest horse in it kept going.
Quiz nuggets
- Foinavon won the 1967 Grand National at 100/1 after a mass pile-up stopped virtually the whole field.
- The chaos was caused by the riderless Popham Down veering across the 23rd fence — the smallest on the course, later named the Foinavon fence in 1984.
- Jockey John Buckingham, in his first National, steered around the melee; the remounted favourite Honey End under Josh Gifford finished second, 15 lengths back.
- Foinavon had been sold by Anne, Duchess of Westminster — the owner of Arkle — and travelled with a companion goat called Susie.
- Neither owner Cyril Watkins nor trainer John Kempton was at Aintree; Kempton was riding at Worcester that afternoon.