“Every young boy who has a pony dreams of winning the Grand National,” Paul Townend said. “You look forward to Christmas as much for the presents as you do for getting the Christmas tree afterwards and building a Grand National fence. It’s a unique race. It’s a special race.”
Townend hadn’t won the Grand National before Saturday. He had won about everything else: the Champion Hurdle, the Champion Chase, the Irish Grand National. He has won the Cheltenham Gold Cup four times, as many times as any other rider in the history of the race. But the Grand National is a unique test, some of the best National Hunt jockeys have gone through their entire careers without winning it.
Last year, Townend rode Gaillard Du Mesnil to finish third, his best ever finish. Now he has gone two places better and etched his name in racing history.
• Favourite I Am Maximus wins the Grand National at 7-1
Of course, it helps when you have Willie Mullins in your corner. But it’s an arrangement of reciprocity. Despite what he says, the fact that he is the perennial Irish champion trainer’s first-choice rider is not down to pure happenstance. Right place, right time, the rider will tell you, but there is far more to it than that.
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Townend had big riding boots to fill when Ruby Walsh announced his retirement from the saddle in 2019, but there was never a doubt that he would be up to the task. He had earned the job. He was talented and he was committed, and he had delivered as a youngster when he had been presented with the opportunities. He went to Mullins’ for transition year, and he never left.
He was 18 years old when Ruby Walsh was on the sidelines and Mullins needed a rider for Hurricane Fly in the 2008 Royal Bond Hurdle. It was only four months earlier that the teenager had ridden his first big winner — Indian Pace for John Kiely in the Galway Hurdle — and he had never ridden in a Grade 1 race before. Entrusted with the ride though, he repaid his trainer’s faith with minimum fuss.
It is almost five years now since Townend became Mullins’ number one rider. Sitting in a coffee shop late last summer, he spoke of the respect that he has for the job. You’d never take the job for granted, he said then. If you did, you wouldn’t be doing it justice. It’s too big a job for you to be resting on your laurels. There are a lot of owners investing in it, you feel responsible, you have to perform.
“I feel like I have matured into it,” he said then. “I’ve got a little more confident in it, but I’d never take it for granted.”
He was brilliant on Galopin Des Champs in the 2023 Cheltenham Gold Cup. The early part of the race didn’t go according to plan, but he adopted and rode the race that would maximise his horse’s chance of winning, which he duly did.
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And you will rarely see a better ride in a National Hunt race than the ride that Townend gave I Am Maximus to win the Irish Grand National last year. Everything went wrong on the first circuit at Fairyhouse so that, setting out on the second circuit, the task looked well beyond horse and rider, as evidenced by the fact that I Am Maximus traded at 119/1 in running. But Townend moved his horse to the outside, got him into his rhythm, allowed him to ease his way into the race, and delivered with a challenge at the final fence that saw him get home by a length.
He didn’t ride I Am Maximus again in a race until he rode him in the Randox Grand National at Aintree on Saturday. I Am Maximus is obviously talented, but he can be quirky, he can jump to his left, and he can take a lot of riding. You wouldn’t have known that, though, as you watched horse and rider ease their way through yesterday’s race. Down the inside from early, in a racing rhythm, metronomic, fence to fence.
I Am Maximus was a little to his left at most of his obstacles, but his rider never had to check his momentum, and that was key. It appeared as if he always had racing room. That’s what the best riders do. Like the best midfielders always seem to have time on the ball.
I Am Maximus was seventh jumping the final fence on Saturday, and not many Grand National winners are seventh jumping the final fence. When he moved to the outside on the run-in and started to make his ground, however, you always felt that he was going to get there.
“Surreal,” said Paul Townend.
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A childhood dream come true for a young boy with a pony.
