Bob Champion’s Aintree fairytale
To Bob Champion, a kid sitting in the darkness of his local cinema, the Pathe news coverage of the Grand National would light up his life.
“I’d be about eight or nine but every time I saw it, I’d see it as the race of fairytales,” he recalls wistfully. “I still do.”
He’s 66 now but, of course, Bob still believes in fairytales. As the co-author of sport’s most beautiful one, he just has to. Put it to him that there’ll never be any story more uplifting or simply perfect than that of the man and horse who both cheated death, fought back heroically and won the greatest race of all, and he’ll modestly offer you various other contenders.
“How about Foinavon? Or Red Rum? They’re fairytales,” he suggests.
True, but nothing beats Champion on Aldaniti in 1981, told he’d only got eight months to live going through hellish treatment and recuperation from testicular cancer, only to join forces again with a horse once so crippled with tendon injuries and a fractured hock, that vets pondered putting him down.
Between them, Champion, with his lungs still damaged from the chemotherapy, and Aladaniti, on those fragile piano legs, combined for a resurrection so unlikely and emotional that within two years the victory was already enshrined on celluloid, with John Hurt playing the role of Bob in ‘Champions’.
Even now, 34 years on, at his Newmarket home, Champion’s big heart soars when he receives another letter from a cancer survivor telling him that his story, or just a simple message of support from him, was their shining inspiration.
“That means more to me than anything,” he says.
The National means everything to him too. So today, as always, Champion will roll up at Aintree with his Liverpool fan club ready to slap their old hero’s back. He loves them and they adore him back, perhaps recognising a kind of down to earth, unbreakable symbol of the great race.
Here, after all, is a Yorkshire man who’s beaten cancer, who has survived two heart attacks, who has bounced back up from countless heavy falls in his day job and who, just a few weeks ago, was able to walk away from a four-vehicle motorway crash which killed the driver who had ploughed into the back of his car.
The latest drama was the sort to jolt Champion into reflection.
“I tell you what, it did shock me. Shook me up, actually,” he says.
He escaped, whiplashed and sore as hell, but as he watched forlornly for two hours from the central reservation as the rescue crews tried in vain to save the victim whose child had also been in the car, it made him appreciate how lucky he was.
“That’s the thing. Sometimes, I feel I’m a lucky person, sometimes not. Cancer, heart attacks …. I’ve got my unlucky side, but then there’s the other side. I’m still up and down but I’m still here!”
He chuckles. The black humour that serves jump jockeys so well is never far away. He explains that his second heart attack in 2011 occurred eerily exactly 10 years to the day after his first.
“So on the same day in 2021, I’ll save time by just parking outside the hospital,” he smiles.
Looking pretty robust and fit still, he is happy to go along with my suspicion that he is, in some happy way, the ultimate survivor, an unbreakable force. When he talks movingly about the worst moments of his fight against cancer, when he underwent the monstrous but vital new breakthrough chemotherapy which made him think on some days that “I’d just rather be dead”, you’re reminded that like so many in his perilous trade, he is made of the sternest stuff.
No jump jockey, though, thinks Champion, has ever been steelier, more indomitable nor courageously accomplished than AP McCoy.
Which is why when you ask Bob what his dearest wish for in today’s 168th edition of National is, he responds without hesitation: “I’d love to see him win it — and, actually, he’s my tip. Perhaps, it would be the best fairytale for the race since when we won!”
He is not wrong. McCoy mania has taken a stranglehold on Aintree this week as racing hopes beyond hope to see the peerless Irishman, in his record 20th and last ride in the National, steer Shutthefrontdoor, trained by Jonjo O’Neill and owned by J.P McManus, two of his greatest friends and racing partners, to victory.
If he does, McCoy has promised to bring forward his retirement, planned for a few weeks time at the end of the season, and quit there and then on the ultimate high.
“It’s the way he’d deserve to bow out,” muses Champion, who for all his movie fame, never had his giant image projected in a light show on the Liver Building like AP’s has this week.
“He has to be the best ever. AP’s a fantastic man, he has all the credentials. His pain threshold is unbelievable. He gets ‘marmalised’ but he still gets up and rides winners, thousands of ‘em. Blimey, he’s had more winners than I had rides! Think of it that way, and it’s amazing.
“I think he’s got a genuinely great chance too. Shutthefrontdoor didn’t run at Cheltenham, so he’s going to the National as a fresh horse and Jonjo is brilliant with these long-distance chasers, having trained a National winner already (Don’t Push It, ridden by McCoy on another emotional afternoon in 2010). I honestly would love to see AP win it again. He’s been so good for National Hunt racing. How has his body stood it? I was only 33 when I retired and they thought it was old in my era. What he’s been through doesn’t bear thinking about.
“Okay, they’re fortunate that the medical support is so much better today but imagine his intensity and his ultra dedication to keep winning.
“What has set McCoy apart for me is his ability to win on bad horses. Jesus, I’ve see him win so many that he shouldn’t have won on — and he keeps doing it.
“His strength, his will to win, that’s been something else. He never wants to lose. If it’s a selling hurdle, he’ll give it just the same ride as if it’s the Gold Cup and you get the feeling that winning would mean just as much to him.
“Yes, a win for him would be tremendous, not just for him, but for the National and for racing. This race has been through some very hard times in recent years and this would properly seal the way it has bounced back.”
This tribute to McCoy is unforced and effusive, mirroring the way the entire his sport feels about the retiring champ.
Yet even if a win for Shutthefrontdoor today would be epic theatre, the 2015 edition could never have the long-term impact of Champion’s triumph on Aldaniti, which has a claim on being the most important and influential horse race ever run.
Why? Because on the back of their story, two years later Champion set up his Cancer Trust and within five years, his fundraising had helped establish a new cancer research unit at the Royal Marsden Hospital. This year, another new €26m medical research centre, named after him, opened in a Norwich science park. Down the years, his Trust has raised more than €20m for cancer research, rehabilitation and in-patient care.
“Of all I’ve done in my life, I suppose that’s my greatest achievement and those research centres are my monuments. It gives me a great thrill,” says Champion.
They’re monuments to Aldaniti too, the fellow Champion still refers to fondly as “the old horse”.
Unlike his rider, the 27-year-old succumbed to a heart attack and died in 1997. It broke Bob’s heart because they had been a team on and off the course, with the horse having accompanied him on so many fund-raising ventures.
Every now and then, Champion still makes the pilgrimage to pay his respects at Aldaniti’s resting place in the garden at Barkfold Manor, Sussex home of the horse’s owners, Nick and Valda Embiricos.
“He was a good ‘un, I loved everything about him. His attitude. Very game, very brave, he’d gallop and fight until he dropped, so competitive.”
The way Bob talks about his old friend, telling the story of how Aldaniti had to endure his own hell of being consigned to his horse box with his leg in plaster for six months at the same time as Champion himself was fighting back from cancer, you are reminded that man and horse must actually have been quite alike, two champions twinned in their stubborn resilience.
It’s funny, says Bob. Every year, the tale becomes more ancient, and yet every year it seems to be clearer and more fondly resonant to people.
“It still feels significant,” he says. If McCoy wins today, as he hopes, then it will be another National for the ages — but today’s race won’t ever surpass the day when Champion and his wonder horse made us all realise, just as that eight-year-old boy in the cinema seemed to instinctively understand, that this really is the “race of fairytales”.
