Motherway: She’s a cracker

If James Motherway’s Bluesea Cracker wins the Grand National, she’ll become the first mare since Nickel Coin back in 1951 to win the race. But Declan Colley says it will cause a sensation for reasons other than her sex.

AS HE loaded his mare onto the truck early Wednesday morning ahead of the road trip to Dublin and the onward ferry journey to Liverpool, James Motherway reflected that this racing business truly is the real theatre of dreams. Forget all that football nonsense, he thought, racing is the one sport – more than any other – where the possible and the fantastical collide in equal measures.

Why, just a week previous, he was the trainer – unheard of twelve months previously until his mare sprung a 25/1 shock win in the Irish Grand National – in a small east Cork yard with no more than 17 inmates. And then JP McManus entered the picture. JP, the multi-millionaire who has been racing’s greatest benefactor over the past couple of decades, bought his mare.