Chris Cook in The Guardian
I've been banging on for a while about how different the Grand National fences were going to be this year and so it came to pass on Saturday, with only two fallers, while many others plunged through the famous green obstacles and landed running. You can regret the passing of the much more demanding old fences with their solid timber cores, or not; however we feel, the new ones are here to stay.
Punters will have to adjust their thinking to some extent when approaching future Nationals. It will no longer be safe to simply draw a line through a horse who does not always jump well. Bad jumping can still end a horse's chance in the new National but I note that Auroras Encore has five falls, an unseated and a refused on his record, yet coped comfortably with Aintree.
While jumping may be less important in the future than of yore, stamina will be even more important, it seems to me. There has usually been a strong pace in past Grand Nationals but the stiffer fences often had a steadying effect at some point, particularly if one of the pacesetters fell or unseated at an early stage.
On Saturday, it seemed to me that we saw a strong pace maintained for a long way, thanks to Balthazar King and Across The Bay, who both finished the course in their own time after fading on the second circuit. Thirty-three horses got past halfway and again the effect of that in future will generally be to sustain a strong gallop.
The result was that the first four home turned out to be just about the most doughty stayers in the field, all with proven form at four miles or further. Even Teaforthree, a four-mile winner at the Cheltenham Festival last year, tired dramatically on the run-in.
The eventual time, on going no worse than good to soft, was nine minutes and 12 seconds, making it only the ninth-fastest National of the past 20 and slower than the previous three by seven seconds or more. That seems especially significant, given that the race distance was reduced by about half a furlong this year, which ought to have lopped five or six seconds off the time.
You might imagine that a strong pace would lead to a faster time but, in general terms, a fast time is the result of a race being run at a sustainable pace. Quite often, a very strong pace leads to a slow time because runners are slowing down so dramatically in the latter stages, which is what I think we saw on Saturday.
Now that the fences are known to carry so much less threat than before, I'd expect Nationals to be run at that kind of pace quite often, unless the going is much softer. Indeed, trainers may now be thinking of running faster horses that might previously have avoided the race through concerns over their jumping ability.
The result is that we may be best advised to focus even more than in the past on a horse's ability to keep running when others have had enough. Also, the disadvantage of a high weight, reduced in recent years by changes to the way the race is handicapped, may now be back in place, since those with more to carry are at greater risk of sudden fatigue.
Auroras Encore had 10-3, the lowest winning weight for 14 years. There were 17 horses in Saturday's race with 10-12 or more on their backs - that's 42% of the field - but only one of them finished in the first 11.
At some point, I'll try to work out some sectional times from Saturday's race and compare them to previous years, to see if they confirm my idea about the pace.