‘What’s the most difficult jump? The next one’
Carl Llewellyn, twice a National-winning jockey, walks the fearsome course with Jim White to reveal the many pitfalls
When Carl Llewellyn takes a bunch of first-time Grand National jockeys on a walk round Aintree ahead of the race today, he will offer them all sorts of tips for negotiating their way across the four-and-ahalf-mile obstacle course. But one in particular he cannot emphasise enough: remember to take a couple of spare pairs of goggles. When he rode Earth Summit to victory in 1998, Llewellyn left nothing to chance. As he left the weighing room, heading to the parade ring to mount the horse, he was wearing four pairs stacked one on top of the other.
“By the time I crossed the line I was down to my last pair,” he recalls. “And it was so muddy I could hardly see through them.”
As the rain lashes down on the final preparations for today’s race, Llewellyn is taking
The Daily Telegraph round the course, sharing some of his experiences. Outside the bars and pavilions, workmen are huddling together under whatever shelter they can find. The tarpaulin covering an open-top bus sags beneath a puddle of gathering water. Pools have formed under a somewhat optimistic ice-cream van. Unperturbed by the biblical conditions, Llewellyn, clad, unlike his haplessly ill-equipped interviewer, sensibly in golfing waterproofs, marches on. Although the grass is still pristine, unsullied by hooves, there is an audible squelch as he goes.
“It was just like this in ’98, horrible, poured down the day before and all night. It was very heavy, so wet there were doubts about the race taking place.”
Which was why Llewellyn took precautions, arriving at the start line looking like a sunglass salesman on Copacabana Beach, covered in a holding pattern of goggles. “You strip them off as you go. When each pair gets completely covered in mud you just whisk them off and the theory is there’s another clean pair underneath,” he explains. “You try and judge when to do it. You could wipe them, but when you have wet gloves all you do is smear them. You’re looking to keep one pair at the bottom of the pile to give you a good view of the run in.” That is the kind of knowledge that comes with experience. Llewellyn remembers the first time he rode the race, as a 22-year-old novice in 1987, being given an astute bit of advice by a wizened old pro. “He said, ‘Don’t even think about trying to win the race, just try to get around’. That was your target, and to do it was such an achievement in those days. Actually that is a brilliant piece of advice: just survive. Because if you don’t survive you can’t possibly win.”
He recalls that first time being almost hamstrung with nerves as he sat among his fellow riders before heading out. But then he
was not alone. “It’s a massive mixture of adrenalin and nerves in the jockey room. I was always quiet. There were plenty of people who would normally be very chatty before a race, but when it came to the National, they wouldn’t be. They’d shut up.”
When he finally negotiated his way out to the course, for the first time he was hit by the unique Aintree noise. “It’s not like any race anywhere else. The noise is incredible, but what’s amazing is you can hear individual comments. And it’s a very Liverpool crowd. It’s not like Ascot or Cheltenham, it’s local lads, local girls. And they’re very chatty. As you’re riding out they’ll be shouting at you, ‘I’ve backed you, lad. Win it for me, eh’. That’s why I love it. It’s a race for proper people.”
Not that the first time he was
able to justify his noisy backers’ faith: he fell at Becher’s on circuit two. “When people ask what’s the most difficult fence, I always say the next one because any of them can get you,” he says. “That said, you’re always very aware of where you are in relation to Becher’s, you know you’re four fences away, two fences, it’s next up.”
Standing by the notoriously challenging Becher’s is to be struck how substantial the fence is. Most of us would require a helicopter to negotiate its scale.
But it has changed considerably since Llewellyn first addressed it. These days it is in many ways – from the corridor to allow loose horses to escape, to the reduced drop on the landing side – less lethal that it was.
Its very construction has been modernised. Now it is built on a collapsible plastic frame. In Llewellyn’s time it was made from spruce branches laid over the top of sharpened wooden stakes. After many of the branches had been knocked away as 40 horses piled through it on the first circuit, so the stakes were exposed. It was like jumping medieval fort defences. “Oh yeah, second time round you could see the stakes,” he says. “It focused you where to jump: you aimed to miss them.”
Not that it was always possible to jump where intended. Llewellyn would enter every National with a pre-determined plan, where he would steer the horse, what line to take at each fence. But in the
rolling maelstrom of the event, such plans tended to be revised almost from the off. “There’s so much to go wrong, people are changing direction in this race more than any other, there’s loose horses, it’s mayhem,” he says. “I shouldn’t be saying this as a former champion, but if I’m honest the thing I’d say you most need to win this race is luck.”
Indeed, Llewellyn didn’t complete the course until his luck was in sufficiently to finish first in 1992. And then, even as he steered Party Politics home, he could not quite believe it. “I never thought I’d got it, even, stupidly as I went over the line. It wasn’t a close finish, but there’s a part of you thinks, ‘Is this really me?’ You think, ‘Oh I must have mucked it up’. You’re in a bit of a haze. You cannot believe you’ve done it.”
It was not like that six years later. When he won in 1998, he could relish every fine point of victory. Now, as he stands on the finish line, looking up at the Princess Royal Stand, the Merseyside rain hammering down on his cap, he recalls the emotions of that victory 20 years ago. “It was so much more enjoyable than the first time,” he says. “I was older, I believed I could win rather than just survive. Up the straight, there were two of us clear and I knew I was going better than him, knew he was carrying a lot more weight. Over the last you’re thinking, ‘I’ve a chance here’.
“The walk back in was the best of my life. The crowd, the noise, the punters shouting at you that you’ve won big for them. Nothing I have done before or since has come close to the feeling I had as I made that walk. If you could buy that feeling you’d go bankrupt spending all your money on it.”
He knows when he walks the jockeys round the course today the chances of a debutant experiencing that feeling are remote. But how he envies them the opportunity.
“Sounds obvious, but what I tell them is, ‘Enjoy it’. You really need to relax as a jockey, let the horse relax too. A lot of lads over-compensate for the nerves and the occasion by getting too harsh. I tell them, ‘Calm down, don’t let the adrenalin make you too fierce on the reins’.”
And he pauses for a moment and smiles. “Mind you, as I can well remember, first time round it’s much easier said than done.”