Nick Embiricos
Racehorse owner who won the Grand National with Aldaniti
NICK EMBIRICOS, who has died aged 81, was a racing owner whose best-known horse, Aldaniti, despite being plagued by injury, carried
Bob Champion to victory in the 1981 Grand National while the jockey was still recovering from cancer. Embiricos went on to help found the Bob Champion Cancer Trust and served for 20 years as its chairman.
He was born Stamati Nicholas Jacques Embiricos in London into a Greek shipping family on January 29 1937; his father, also Stamati, was killed in a plane crash in 1939. Nick’s American mother, Anne, took her son on a cruise, and when the ship docked at Bridgetown in Barbados she decided to stay there.
Nick attended Lodge School on the island, then Groton School in Massachusetts and Yale, where he rowed and played polo and American Football. He had ambitions to be a diplomat, but instead was sent to London to work in the family shipping firm.
He had become friends with the Gifford family, and he began to pay close attention to the racing scene. His first horses were trained by Ryan Price before they were taken over by Josh Gifford in the 1970s. One of Embiricos’s horses, Miners Frolic, was ridden by Tina Cook, Gifford’s daughter, to individual and team Olympic bronze medals in Beijing in 2008 and team silver in London four years later.
With his second wife, Valda, Embiricos ran a small operation, Barkfold Manor Stud in Kirdford, where they bred the Cheltenham Festival winner, The Package. When Aldaniti came along he was trained by Gifford, and showed tremendous promise in the 1978-79 National Hunt season. But in November 1979 the horse suffered a leg injury at Sandown that kept him out for a year.
The patience Embiricos showed as the horse gradually recovered was repeated with Bob Champion when the jockey was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 1979.
“Aldaniti had a load of ability, but he had so many problems,” recalled Champion. “When he broke down the last time the vets did say put him down, but Nick and Velda said ‘no way’. They were just the most lovely owners and lovely, easy people to ride for. The horses always came first with them and they were fantastic people to deal with. They were a lot of fun, too.”
Aldaniti returned to the track in 1981, with all sights set on that year’s National. He showed that he was still a winner at Ascot in February, and started at Aintree as 10/1 second favourite. He took the lead at the 11th fence and never lost it, holding off the favourite, Spartan Missile, to win by four lengths.
At the end of the year horse and jockey won the Team Award at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year ceremony.
The Bob Champion Cancer Trust was initially set up to handle the flood of donations sent in following the Grand National to the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, where Champion had been treated.
“Without Nick’s perseverance it would have gone nowhere,” said Champion. “Basically, it was all down to his hard work. He was a very hands-on chairman.”
In the 1984 film Champions, in which John Hurt played the jockey (and Aldaniti played himself), Embiricos was played by Peter Barkworth.
Other successful horses owned by Embiricos were Brave Highlander; the Grade 3 winner Killaghy Castle; A Hare Breath; and Evening Venture, a winner on the Flat.
Nick Embiricos married Undine Harrison in 1958. They had one son, Nick, but divorced in 1965. Two years later he married Valda Rogerson; she survives him along with their daughter, Alexandra, who became a racing trainer for some years, and by Nick and two stepsons.
Nick Embiricos, born January 29 1937, died November 20 2018