Paul Nicholls chases his National obsession
A tour around Paul Nicholls yard, tucked away in the Somerset hamlet of Ditcheat, is to be confronted with the magnitude of success that the man has achieved in just over a dozen years.
The names of the horses and the glittering prizes that they have won are recalled on nameplates that are prominent on the stable doors and amounts to a Who’s Who of the winter game. From the early days when the likes of See More Business and Call Equiname provided the first high-profile Cheltenham Festival wins in the Cheltenham Gold Cup and the Queen Mother Champion Chase, the flying two-mile chaser Azertyuiop and the current dominant names of Kauto Star, Denman and Big Buck’s, one race has remained stubbornly elusive.
Nicholls will saddle four runners in this year’s National, hoping that one of them can improve on his record in the race. Since he saddled Just So, to finish a respectable sixth to Party Politics in 1992, Nicholls has aimed another 43 shots at the target and seen everything from second-favourite Double Thriller getting no further than the first fence in 1999 to Royal Auclair beating all but Hedgehunter in 2005, although as Royal Auclair was beaten 14 lengths the bulls eye must have seemed as far away as ever.
It has reached a stage when, asked last year about his chances, Nicholls simply smiled and said: “What, with my record.”
However, the markets have ignored those statistics and Big Fella Thanks, the choice of stable jockey Ruby Walsh, is the favourite after his win at Newbury in early March. “We’ve trained him for the race ever since he came in. He ran last year as a novice, finished sixth, and he’s a much stronger horse this year,” Nicholls said. “He wouldn’t have been winning a two-and-a-half-mile handicap chase last year. We’ve purposely targeted the race with him, not been too hard on him, so, with Ruby on board, we’re looking forward to it.
“He doesn’t want it too soft so if it’s good to soft on Saturday, that’d be absolutely perfect. He’s won a Great Yorkshire Chase on the soft but he’s a much happier horse on the better ground.”
When discussing the grounds on which he picked Big Fella Thanks, Walsh did admit to a slight worry about whether the horse would take to the National fences again after his sixth place in the race last year but Nicholls is not unduly worried. “Some horses will go and take to it a second time and others will think ‘whoa, I’ve had enough of that’,” he explained. “You can never be really sure but we’ve done a lot of schooling with him this year and he’s jumped well and I don’t see it being a problem.”
If Tricky Trickster is to break Nicholls’ duck one problem is that he will have to carry more weight than any winner since Corbiere in 1983, who also had 11st 4lb. The other could be whether he can come back from the below-par performance he put up when only ninth to Imperial Commander, beaten over 100 lengths, in last month’s Cheltenham Gold Cup.
It is a run that has the rest of the world searching for a reason, not that Nicholls was able to offer any further knowledge. “No, I wish I did,” he admitted candidly. “He just had an off-day and if he hadn’t run in the Gold Cup he’d probably still be favourite. You can allow every horse one bad run but I wish he’d come back and I’d found some sort excuse. He can be a bit of a lazy horse and I just think he half went to sleep mid-race. But he’s come out of it well - he did a great piece of work on Saturday morning with Big Fella Thanks – and I suppose the good thing about it is that it’s taken the pressure off him.”
The other two Nicholls runners are My Will, third in the race 12 months ago, and Nozic, an outsider who will be ridden by last year’s Grand National-winning jockey Liam Treadwell. Of My Will, Nicholls said: “A lot of his form has been on really soft ground, which he doesn’t like any more. He’ll have to jump better than he did last year to get him in with a chance, but he ran OK in the Gold Cup and he’s down a couple of pounds, so he’d have an outside chance.
“If you look at last year’s race Liam Treadwell won on a 100-1 shot and it would be a dream come true if he could win on another one.”
Nicholls would happily settle for anyone winning but claims that he is not that bothered. “Not really, we’ve just been unlucky,” he said. “It’s a unique race and one day we might get lucky. If we don’t we’re not going to lose any sleep over it.”
May be, but a winner would still be the dream result.
Paul Nicholls’s Grand National record: 1992 Just So (6th); 1996 Vicompt De Valmont (10th), Deep Bramble (pulled up before 2 out), Brackenfield (unseated rider 19th); 1997 Straight Talk (fell 14th); 1998 What A Hand (fell 1st), Court Melody (fell 6th), General Crack (pulled up 11th); 1999 Strong Chairman (15th), Double Thriller (fell 1st), 2000 Earthmover (fell 4th), Torduff Express (fell 13th), Flaked Oats (fell 20th), Escartefigue (unseated rider 30th); 2001 Earthmover (fell 4th); 2002 Murt’s Man (pulled up before 17th), Ad Hoc (brought down 27th); 2003 Montifault (5th), Fadalko (unseated rider 6th), Ad Hoc (unseated rider 19th), Shotgun Willy (pulled up before 22nd), Torduff Express (unseated rider 27th); 2004 Exit To Wave (pulled up before 9th); 2005 Royal Auclair (2nd), Heros Collonges (8th), L’Aventure (15th), Ad Hoc (fell 22nd); 2006 Royal Auclair (fell 1st), Le Roi Miguel (pulled up before 19th), Cornish Rebel (pulled up before 19th), Silver Birch (fell 15th), Le Duc (unseated rider 8th), Heros Collonges (unseated rider 15th); 2007 Royal Auclair (fell 9th), Le Duc (unseated rider 6th), Eurotrek (pulled up before22nd), Thisthatandtother (pulled up before30th); 2008 Cornish Sett (12th), Mr Pointment (pulled up before last), Turko (fell 25th); 2009 My Will (3rd), Big Fella Thanks (6th), Cornish Sett (17th), Eurotrek (pulled up 17th).
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