VIEW TO A THRILL
Alexander’s grey leads home hopes of Aintree glory
SHOULD Scottish trainer Nick Alexander win the Randox Health Grand National with Lake View Lad on Saturday, he might be tempted to paint the town red in celebration.
It will be a far more rewarding experience than the time he had to deal with the hair-raising experience of things turning orange.
Long before he concentrated on trying to find a horse good enough to contest the £1million Aintree spectacular, Alexander was the finance director of a small toiletries and cosmetic manufacturer in Glenrothes, Fife.
He recalled: ‘There was one case of a batch of hair gel which ended up in the south side of Dublin being sold through cash and carries and local convenience stores. One morning we got a complaint from someone who had used it saying that their hair had turned orange. By lunchtime five people had complained to say the same thing.
‘At that point, we realised we must have got the potion wrong. Fortunately, I was nothing to do with the mixing up of it all but I was left to handle all the calls and, rather insultingly, we sent them a hamper of our products as a gesture of goodwill.’ Alexander, 57, is hardly the archetypal trainer. Quite the reverse. A history of art graduate from Aberdeen University, Alexander spent most of the 1980s working as a stockbroker in the City of London before another financial sector job brought him back to Edinburgh.
Back then, there was no thought of training racehorses for a living. A more likely career path would have been the diverse family businesses, which included the Alexander bus and coach building works in Falkirk that is now in other hands but still going strong and known as Alexander Dennis.
But horses were in Alexander’s blood. His late fatherer Cyril trained Subaltern, - winner of the 1966 Aintree Fox Hunters’ Chase when ridden by John Lawrence, later better known as TV pundit and journalist Lordd Oaksey.
While Alexander andd his three brothers once all rode against each other in a five-runner point-to-point in Fife, albeit finishing second, third, fourth and fifth as ‘we were all keeping an eye on each other rather than the opposition’.
The Alexander family’s 800-acre farm in Perth and Kinross now underpins the racing stable, where among the 40 horses Nick trains is grey gelding Lake View Lad whose career has gone from strength to strength.
Alexander, who originally took out a permit to train the family horses in 2002 before graduating to a full trainer’s licence in 202007, admits: ‘Training is a hobby which basically became my job and all the other bits of business I was involved in have completely disappeared apart from rurunning the farm.’ At £70,000, Lake View Lad rremains the most Alexander has ever paid for a horse. After wins in the Rehearsal Chase at Newcastle, the Rowland Meyrick Chase at Wetherby and third place under top weight in the Ultima Handicap Chase at the Cheltenham Festival, he definitely is a contender. At 12-1, Lake View Lad is one of the shortest-priced home-trained hopes trying to hold off an avalanche of Irish- trained runners having struck up a productive partnership with jockey Henry Brooke.