Jump back in time to a golden age of gentlemen riders

The horse is an antique, its gentleman jockey a relic of the amateur era, and the race is the biggest in the steeplechase calendar. Yet can the unlikely pairing of Oscar Time and Sam WaleyCohen turn back the clock at this week’s Grand National?

At 14, and trailing a game if not entirely glamorous record, Warwickshire-trained Oscar Time would be the oldest horse to win the National since 1853, while the last amateur rider to triumph was The Daily Telegraph’s racing correspondent, Marcus Armytage, 25 years ago. With odds of around 50-1, the bookies aren’t giving the pair much chance, but Aintree is ready for a fairy tale.

For a start, the redoubtable bay eats fences like Smarties, storming over, or, if necessary, through them in a manner that mocks the course’s terrifying reputation. He has fallen only three times in his 10-year steeplechasing career, and in the National staying on your feet is half the challenge. “People say he’s incredibly old to be still racing,” says Waley-Cohen, “but he’s in great form, and he comes alive at Aintree.”

Indeed, while steeplechasers tend to peak at around 10, and even the seemingly immortal Red Rum retired at 12, Sam’s venerable mount appears to be still picking up speed.

All of which raises the question of what might happen if the beast had a better jockey. “I am the wrong shape, wrong weight, not fit enough, just basically incompetent,” admits WaleyCohen, 32.

Sitting on half-a-ton of horse flesh travelling at 30mph for four-and-a-half miles and over 30 monster fences is no joke even when you are being paid for it. To do it for nothing seems like a form of madness. While Sam almost certainly understates his abilities, he has always seen racing as more of a passion than a profession. “I do it for the love of it,” he says. “It’s like someone kicking a ball in the park. When you score a goal, you pretend you’re at Wembley. When you ride a horse, you pretend you’re at Cheltenham or the Grand National. You don’t actually expect it’s going to happen.”

It first happened for Sam in 2007, when he rode Liberthine, owned by his businessman father, Sir Robert Waley-Cohen, into fifth place at the National. Four years later – now teamed up with Oscar Time – he was runner-up. Last year the pair came fourth. Can they pull it off on Saturday?

There is no doubt which of them has the superior pedigree. Oscar Time was born in Ireland of unsung parentage and sold for a relatively modest £30,000 as a three-year-old to Dublinbased trainer Martin Lynch. It took him six attempts to notch up a win, but after demonstrating a flair for fence-leaping was bought in 2010 by Waley-Cohen Snr, as a Grand National prospect.

Young Sam, by contrast, grew up with the best of everything. The WaleyCohens are one of Britain’s most illustrious Jewish families. Sam’s greatgrandfather, Robert, oversaw the creation of the modern Shell oil business; his grandfather, Bernard, became Lord Mayor of London; and his father founded the Alliance Medical company in 1989, sold it 18 years later for £600 million and is the current chairman of Cheltenham Racecourse.

The third of four children, Sam was educated in London and at Oxford. At his prep school, Weatherby, in Notting Hill, he became chummy with Prince William and – later – Kate Middleton. The story goes that after the couple split up in 2007, Sam played a key role in reuniting them with joint invitations to a party thrown at his family’s Oxfordshire mansion.

Married since 2012 to party organiser Annabel Ballin, Sam now runs a chain of dental practices, an idea he says he had after a chat about why the British tended to have such bad teeth.

He says he has never considered turning professional, and it is hard not to feel that his whole life belongs to the great British amateur sporting tradition. He has climbed Mont Blanc only to ski down the other side, run the London marathon, flies a helicopter, and regularly dashes between his Chelsea apartment and the family stud near Banbury on a Ducati motorbike.

His inspiration, he says, is something more powerful – and poignant – than money. In 1995 his younger brother, Thomas, was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer that affects only a handful of children a year. Thomas fought the disease for almost a decade, dying just before his 20th birthday in 2004. Today, Sam keeps Thomas’s initials tooled into his saddle. “He had great energy and made the most out of life,” he has said. “He is an inspiration to me. Losing him means I strive to make the most of every minute of every day.”

It should take around nine of those minutes to go around the Grand National course. Although amateur jockey and the unfancied horse are really galloping back in time.