Around here they call it a dreich morning; grey and damp, mist or fog dulls the view of Loch Leven. We wait for a horse to gallop from the bottom of a field. Soon, Silver By Nature comes our way; grey but not like the morning, stretching, majestic, looking every bit a Grand National horse.
Fifty years have passed since Nicolaus Silver, another grey, won at Aintree and isn’t it time for another? But it is the National, four miles and four furlongs with 30 opportunities to fall along the way.
Silver By Nature has his ticket and his chance. He produced the best prep performance of all when carrying top weight and easily winning Haydock’s Grand National Trial in February.
This Saturday he will have a stone less, although it is far from certain he will get the soft ground that plays to his stamina. Even on drier ground, he’s good enough to compete.
Coming up this hill the further he gallops the stronger he gets and when they reach the top, his rider Peter Buchanan has to stand in his stirrups and pull hard to rein the horse back. “If this isn’t a Grand National horse, I don’t know what is,” Buchanan said after the win at Haydock.
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Standing on one side of the all-weather gallop is Lucinda Russell, who has guided Silver By Nature’s progress to the foot of jump racing’s Everest. She can become just the third woman to train a National winner.
Thirty-nine wins makes this Russell’s best ever season. She knows what she’s doing. Here there are television cameras and newspaper people, photographers everywhere and so many questions. They ask what it would be like to win the National, what it would mean, and it bothers her that she cannot put into words something so obvious.
Eventually she agrees that if Silver By Nature won the National, she could sit on her couch at age 90 and the recollection would come with a warm glow. It began with love. “From the earliest age, I loved horses. Not Cindy or Barbie but horses and ponies.
“Driving home from school I would get my mum to stop the car so I could give an apple to a pony in a field. We stopped every day and my poor parents had no interest in horses. At the time, we lived in Edinburgh but then when I was 13, we moved to a house in the country. For me, that was bliss. I could wake up in the morning, look outside and see my pony.”
At first she dreamt of being a show jumper and winning the gold medal at the Olympics. Though she rode well, she wasn’t good enough to be an Olympic champion and so her focus switched to three-day eventing but simple economics determined that when she nurtured a good horse, it had to be sold. And as she learned she wasn’t going to be the best three-day eventer, her passion for that sport waned. Not her love for horses, though. They came, they went, she prepared some for point-to-point racing and many won.
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In 1995 she was persuaded to apply for a licence to train horses under the rules of racing and that’s when it started. “I have always loved horses but I also had to win. If I couldn’t be the best, I didn’t want to stay at show jumping. Same with three-day eventing and slowly I realised the thing I did best was train horses to run fast.
“This desire to win may have come from my father. He’s had a long and good career in business and always believed that in business if something wasn’t going to pay for itself, you shouldn’t do it. My variation on that was that if I wasn’t going to be successful, then I didn’t want to do it.”
Her first runner was Fiveleigh Builds at Perth in September 1995 and it won. Her progress was then steady until what seemed a great moment when Strong Resolve was one of the favourites for the 2005 Grand National.
“He was a brilliant jumper, almost a freak in terms of his jumping ability and it was presumed he would be ideally suited to the Aintree fences. If he had he would have won by a long way but he wasn’t. He had to change his style at Aintree and he just wasn’t the same horse.
“It should have a good time in my life but it wasn’t. My marriage was ending at the same time and it was difficult.” A year or so, Russell met Peter Scudamore, the eight-time champion jockey whose marriage had also ended. “We had known each other for a long time but I never felt that way towards him. Then I was like a schoolgirl again, very much in love and have been that way since.” Scudamore and she are now partners, personally and professionally.
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“The thing about Luce and I is that we were friends long before we were lovers,” he says. “People say, ‘and you moved to Scotland,’ and I used to think it was way up there but it’s not. It’s like crossing a state-line in America, that’s all.”
Russell credits Scudamore with encouraging her to stand back and not try to do everything in the yard. “I felt I had to do everything, ride out, muck out, brush down the horses, entries, jockeys, the lot.
“I still do the feeding but now the two women who have been with me from the start, Jaimie [assistant trainer, Duff] and Alison [head girl, Copley] do everything.”
Scudamore’s time as jockey to perennial champion trainer Martin Pipe has led to a subtle change in Russell’s training as her horses work for shorter periods at a higher intensity. According to Scudamore, she is very good at keeping them fit.
Owned by the chairman of St Johnstone football club, Geoff Brown, Silver By Nature would be easily good enough to win the National on soft ground and much remains in the lap of the weather gods.
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Russell has a friend who lives along the course at Aintree and texts a report on the going every morning. Sensible people are not supposed to worry about that which they can’t control but, nevertheless, they do. But if there’s something else that Scudamore brings to the party, it is this: “I remember being at the wedding of Fred Winter’s daughter and he came over to the table where I was sat. For me, it was like God coming to sit amongst us. I was champion jockey at the time, riding lots of winners and you know he said to me: ‘Remember, however many winners you ride, they won’t make you happy.’
“I never forgot it.”