The jockey, trying to ride Tiger Roll to the first repeat National win since Red Rum, is laid-back before Saturday’s big race
Some jockeys brood before they ride a big-race favourite. They retreat into their shell, spend countless hours poring over their mount’s form, obsess about how events could unfold and try to come up with a plan for every eventuality. Davy Russell is not one of them.
Tiger Roll, Russell’s mount in Saturday’s Grand National, is forecast to be the shortest-priced favourite for the race for almost half a century. Millions of punters around the world will be straining to pick out Russell’s maroon and white colours from among the 40 runners thundering towards the first fence and many tens of millions of pounds will be riding on his back.
Yet the man holding the reins will not give it much thought until an hour or so beforehand. “I don’t have a routine as such and I’ve got other rides tomorrow,” Russell said on Friday, “so I really won’t think about it until the National is the next race to ride in. It’s just one of those things. I know it’s not just another race but you have to treat it like that.
“I don’t know whether it would upset some people but it just really doesn’t bother me what price he is. I’ve ridden 100-1 chances in the race and shorter ones too, horses that were fancied and ran badly. The race itself is so fast and so much can happen that you can’t get wrapped up in that.
“Of course, I feel that there’s an obligation to the general public to give a good show, but I can’t control the price and I just have to put him in the best possible position to win and not overthink it too much. You can’t go back and forth about last year, you have to start afresh again. New race, new situation, new circumstances …”
It is an approach that served Russell well last year, when Tiger Roll added the National to a long list of big-race wins stretching back to the Triumph Hurdle at Cheltenham in 2014. In the 12 months since, Tiger Roll has added two more wins to his record with Keith Donoghue in the saddle and taken his immense popularity with the racing public to fresh heights. Russell, who was in the saddle for the Triumph five years ago, is not surprised.
“He’s incredibly popular, you can feel it off him,” Russell says, “and I think people really relate to him in that race [the National].
“He’s also hugely popular at home in the yard [at Gordon Elliott’s stable in County Meath]. People walk past his door and say hello to him like he’s a person. He’s been in the same box all these years and so everyone knows where he is. Saying hello to him sounds a bit silly, but people just do it and don’t know they’re doing it.
“I’ve never come across a horse like him that I could compare him with. I’ve never come across a horse with a constitution like him, who can mix and match his races from hurdling to chasing and the cross-country jumps.”
The depth of the racing public’s affection for Tiger Roll became clear at Cheltenham last month when he sauntered home as the hot favourite in the Cross-Country Chase an hour after Altior’s win in the more prestigious Queen Mother Champion Chase.
The spectators admired Altior, and loved Tiger Roll. His return to the winners’ enclosure after what is generally one of the more low-key races of the week was arguably the Festival’s biggest party.
A second successive victory in the National would summon up memories of Red Rum in the 1970s, and though Russell will not give the race much thought until shortly beforehand, he does at least have a post-race celebration prepared. His finger-waggling wave to the heavens, picked up from a film about bull-riding during the early years of his career, was a spur-of-the-moment reaction to his first significant success and has stuck with him ever since.
“I was young at the time,” he says. “I don’t know why I did it but I’d just ridden a big winner and I thought I might never have another one, and then I just kept on doing it.
“I regret it at times, but people want me to do it now, a bit like Frankie Dettori jumping off. When you’re walking down the street and there’s people on the other side of the road waving at you and doing it, it’s a bit strange.”
The real star, though, is Tiger Roll, a horse whose appetite for racing seems to grow as the seasons roll by and could see him established as one of Aintree’s all-time greats on Saturday evening.
“You should see him in the mornings when he’s being ridden out,” Russell says. “When he comes back in after his summer holidays, he’s a real handful, really fresh and sharp.
The Guardian
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