25 YEARS AGO THE NATIONAL PITMAN:WE How many WERE ALL million people LET DOWN were watching it? You’re not going to go round just for a joke!

AS the ‘Queen Of Aintree’, Jenny Pitman didn’t mince her words.

And the 71-year-old, in abdication since her retirement from the training ranks in 1999, is just as forthright when it comes to the 1993 Grand National, as she saddled ‘the winner that never was’, Esha Ness.

“We were let down — racing as a whole was let down,” says Pitman, the Leicestershire farmer’s daughter who joined a racing yard as a stable lass at 15 and went on to become National Hunt’s most decorated woman trainer.

“Let down by the incompetence of the people that were supposed to have prepared the racecourse and their equipment for the Grand National.”

Pitman’s relationship with the Jockey Club during her 24 years with a licence was always turbulent.

Divided from racing’s rulers by class and gender, she blisters at the failed bid to halt the race with a circuit to run — “they were like circus clowns leaping about” — and Pitman turns her sharpening stone for the Jockey Club’s inquiry into the events that resulted in the failure of 30 runners to obey starter Keith Brown’s second recall.

“I thought, ‘I wonder if they’ll ask me to give my point of view,’” she remembers.

“Of course, they didn’t. I was that angry, I did my own report — a second-bysecond, inch-by-inch report with my secretary from a video machine that did slow motion, freeze frame — everything.

“And I sent the extensive report to them.”

The Jockey

Club report exonerated

Captain Brown, laying the blame at £28-aday flag man Ken Evans, but Pitman came to a different conclusion.

“It lingers with me that the racing authorities tried to blame the flag man,” Pitman goes on.

“I’ve watched this time and time again, and you can see the starter — the second time he waved his flag, it was like a lollypop stick, because his flag was still all wrapped tight.

“How can a man see that, in amongst all the bawling and shouting and thousands of people, 100 yards down the course?

“You’re the captain of the ship — you take the bullet.”

Pitman, triumphant with National heroes Corbiere in 1983 (left) and Royal Athlete (1995), is well qualified to judge the iconic race’s resonance — and the effects of the

1993 calamity.

“The true tragedies are the flag man, who was hounded by reporters, and a little boy, David, from the Starlight Foundation that was on TV with me. “We’d done an interview with Des Lynam and I said, ‘If one of my horses wins, you can lead it in.’

“He did come back to Lambourn for the Open Day on Good Friday, and he actually passed away on the Tuesday.

“It shouldn’t have been the final outcome for him, being a racing fan.

“It’s a race apart. It’s not just a horserace — it’s about people’s lives.”