At the final fence of the 1973 Grand National, the race was over. Crisp, the giant Australian chaser, had led by as much as thirty lengths, jumping Aintree's monstrous fences as if they were hurdles. But Crisp was carrying top weight of 12 stone, and up Aintree's punishing 494-yard run-in his great stride slowly began to die beneath him. From out of the exhausted silence came a small, neat bay giving him 23 pounds' less burden, relentlessly eating ground. Two strides from the post, Red Rum swept past to win by three-quarters of a length, in 9 minutes 1.9 seconds — a course record that would stand for 17 years. It remains, by common agreement, both the cruellest defeat and the greatest finish in National history — and it was only the beginning.
Everything about the winner was implausible. Red Rum — named, by happy accident of breeding rather than design, from the last letters of his dam Mared and sire Quorum, spelling "murder" backwards — had begun life as a cheap flat-racing sprinter; his first outing, as a two-year-old in April 1967, was a humble seller at Aintree itself, on the eve of Foinavon's freak National, where he dead-heated. By 1972 he had passed through several yards and developed pedal osteitis, a chronic and supposedly incurable inflammation of the foot bone that should have ended his career.
The car dealer and the sea
Enter Donald "Ginger" McCain, a Southport second-hand car dealer and taxi driver who trained a handful of horses in a yard behind his showroom. Acting for his octogenarian client Noel le Mare — a self-made millionaire who had nursed a lifelong dream of winning the National — McCain paid 6,000 guineas for Red Rum at Doncaster sales in 1972. Legend and fact agree on what happened next: McCain galloped the horse on Southport beach and stood him in the cold Irish Sea, and the salt water did what veterinary science could not, soothing the diseased foot. Within a year the write-off was the best staying chaser in Britain.
After the miracle of 1973 came proof it was no fluke. In 1974 Red Rum carried 12 stone — top weight, the burden that had broken Crisp — and won the National again, then added the Scottish Grand National at Ayr weeks later, a double no other horse has completed in the same season. In 1975 and 1976 he finished second under crushing weights, to L'Escargot and Rag Trade respectively. And in 1977, aged 12, written off yet again, he came home 25 lengths clear under jockey Tommy Stack — Brian Fletcher had ridden the first two wins — to a reception commentators struggled to talk over; Peter O'Sullevan's call of the horse "being received now at Aintree" became one of racing's most replayed pieces of commentary. Three Nationals and two seconds in five consecutive years — one hundred and fifty jumps over Becher's Brook, The Chair, Canal Turn and the rest of Aintree's fearsome furniture, without a single fall: no horse before or since has matched it.
National treasure
By then Red Rum had transcended racing, and arguably saved the race itself: through the 1970s Aintree's future hung in doubt amid development schemes and financial wrangling, and the public's love affair with "Rummy" powered the campaigns that secured the National's survival. He was withdrawn on the eve of the 1978 race with a hairline fracture and retired, whereupon he began a second career as a celebrity: leading the National parade for years, switching on the Blackpool Illuminations, appearing in the BBC Sports Personality of the Year studio, opening supermarkets and betting shops with the poise of a minor royal. Ginger McCain, forever "the man who trained Red Rum", finally won the National in his own right again in 2004 with Amberleigh House, 31 years after the first. Red Rum died on 18 October 1995, aged 30, and was buried at the Aintree winning post, his grave marked with an epitaph and his likeness cast in bronze by the paddock; another statue stands in Southport, a town's thank-you to its most famous resident. The horse nobody wanted, with the feet that shouldn't have carried him, lies for ever at the spot he made his own.
Quiz nuggets
- Red Rum is the only horse to win three Grand Nationals — 1973, 1974 and 1977 — finishing second in 1975 and 1976.
- In 1973 he caught Crisp, who was conceding 23lb, near the line; the record time of 9min 1.9sec stood until 1990.
- Trainer Ginger McCain, a Southport car dealer, worked him on the beach and in the sea to ease pedal osteitis; owner Noel le Mare paid 6,000 guineas.
- His name combines the endings of dam Mared and sire Quorum; jockeys were Brian Fletcher (1973–74) and Tommy Stack (1977).
- He died in 1995 aged 30 and is buried beside the Aintree winning post.