Don’t Push It National Winner

The 2010 Grand National was won by Don’t Push It, who had odds of 25/1 preceding the day of the most prestigious horse race in the country. In order to win the Grand National a horse has to prove he has the stamina and skill to tackle four and a half miles of racecourse with thirty jumps thrown in, and he did it with style. The Grand National is well-regarded as the toughest race in the horseracing world and only the trainers of the best horses and jockeys with huge amounts of talent and determination would even dare to think of entering it.

On the day betting saw Don’t Push It being backed as 10-1 joint-favourite, which is thought to be because of jockey Tony McCoy’s association with the horse – he is after all one of the few jockeys that those who don’t know a lot about horseracing will have heard of. He may be fourteen times champion jockey with more than 3,200 winners over his career, but winning the Grand National put an extremely broad smile on the face of McCoy – in all his years of horse-riding, this is the first time in fifteen attempts at the National that McCoy has won – ‘I had to keep consoling myself that Peter Scudamore and John Francome were great champions who never won the race and that I was, at least, in good company.” Not anymore! Some have speculated in the past that McCoy will stop racing once he wins the National but this is yet to be announced – surely a man with such a competitive drive will only find winning the National more of a reason to stay riding.

Trained by Jonjo O’Neill and owned by gambling tycoon JP McManus, Don’t Push It and McCoy put in an outstanding performance, with absolutely no errors, to come home five lengths ahead of Black Apalachi. The 2010 race will be considered to have been a tough one – out of the forty runners only fourteen finished, with the rest not finishing the course (or even starting it in the case of King John’s Castle, one of the quartet of McManus’s horses in the race). Fortunately out of all the falls and tumbles that makes the National the exciting race that it is, the forty horses returned unscathed while the only human casualty was Wayne Hutchinson who went home for a hand X-ray after falling at the first on Eric’s Charm.

Don’t Push It was bred by McManus’s racing manager Frank Berry, who said after his win: ‘I thought his time had passed him by – he’s always been a nearly horse’, but nothing could be further from the truth for the ten year old. He is a smart novice chaser, who won in the 2006-07 season lost by just three quarters of a length to Denman in the Jim Brown Memorial Chase at Cheltenham. He also won the 2009 John Smiths Handicap Chase at Aintree under Tony McCoy, beating Leading Contender by three and a half lengths, despite being 11 pounds heavier.

He might not have been fully convincing prior to the Aintree meeting that he was a Grand National sure cert, as he was pulled up in his last race, the Pertemps Final at the Cheltenham Festival, and even McManus admits that he ‘just had a few quid on Big Fella Thanks,’ but it just goes to show that in a race as tough and inspiring as the Grand National, you just never know what going to happen!