The ride stuff
New TV series goes behind the scenes at Aintree
FILM makers were calling the shots at the Grand National, preserving I Am Maximus’s nail-biting win for a new generation of fans in a documentary lifting the lid on Aintree.
It will follow jockeys, trainers, owners and horses as they rush headlong towards Saturday’s four-mile classic, won by jockey Paul Townend.
It is the first time horseracing has been featured in a prime-time television documentary and follows similar fly-on-the-wall series on football, tennis, F1 and golf.
Nevin Truesdale, chief executive of The Jockey Club, said : “This is a fantastic opportunity to showcase what makes our sport so thrilling and exhilarating.
“And with a prime-time slot it gives a much bigger audience the chance to see the incredible levels of care, love and attention that our equine athletes get from the thousands of stable staff who look after them each year.”
The club has also launched an initiative to help get more youngsters interested in the sport, pledging to provide 100,000 opportunities for young people to experience racing over the next decade. Mr Truesdale added: “We hope to capture the imagination of the next generation of racing fans.”
Win
The three-day festival attracted around 150,000 people to Aintree Racecourse in Liverpool, and Saturday’s National win was watched by a worldwide television audience of around 800 million people.
Merseyside Police had been braced for more protests like those last year that ended in mass arrests, but the force has confirmed it only made eight arrests on Friday and six on Saturday.
I Am Maximus’s win means that in just one year Irish jockey Townend, 33, has won the Grand National, the Gold Cup and Cheltenham’s Champion Hurdle – a treble that has been achieved only once before, back in 1930 by Tommy Cullinan.
Now Townend is the 3/1 favourite to scoop the overseas BBC Sports Personality of the Year award.
Coral’s David Stevens said: “Make no mistake, he is a sportsman at the top of his game right now.”
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