The glorious return of the Grand National crowd

How wonderful after three years to have the crowds back to enjoy the glorious concoction of skill, bravery, razzmatazz and tear-jerking emotion Aintree’s Grand National meeting always provides. Having begun my working life on the Liverpool Daily Post in the days when developers’ greed nearly destroyed this national treasure, I relish my annual pilgrimage. Competition is almost as hot as at the Cheltenham Festival but somehow it comes without the angst. ‘You feel like it’s a party,’ said trainer Dan Skelton. ‘You are part of a carnival. I don’t drink but those who do tell me that they do that well here too.’ ‘Cheltenham is about pressure,’ said Grand National-winning trainer Gordon Elliott. ‘Aintree is more relaxed.’

Certainly Ladies Day at Aintree is like nowhere else in its uninhibited go-for-it glorification of the female form, however that form may originally have been endowed by nature. The buzz starts early with the clanking collection of the beer barrels emptied the day before, an army of wheelie bins advancing across the concourse like so many mini-Tardises – a reminder of the sheer scale of organisation required. At Aintree there is an immediacy of contact unthinkable in Gloucestershire: quietly combing my Racing Post for form clues I might have missed I was surrounded last Friday by a breakaway platoon from a roving she-pack of prosecco–bearing selfie-takers. Cassie and Charlotte demanded winners and I suggested a fiver each on Langer Dan and Jonbon. ‘A fiver!’ scoffed Cassie. ‘I was thinking more like 30 pounds.’ Fortunately both won, though my third shot, the appropriately named Bravemansgame, did not.

As the world now knows this year’s National story came in the shape of amateur jockey Sam Waley-Cohen, who had revealed, rising 40, that this National ride would be his last.