Fifty years on and Richard Pitman is again reliving the most agonising and dramatic 494 yards in sporting history.
His horse Crisp, a 10-year-old carrying 12st, jumped the last fence of the 1973 Grand National clear of Red Rum, an eight-year-old with 23lb less on his back. Pitman talks about the sound of the challenger’s hooves growing louder and him making “a terrible error” on a run-in that is just shy of 500 yards.
The hugely popular jockey, who went on to become a much-respected broadcaster with the BBC, says he has had to live with his “mistake” for the rest of his life. Watch the race back and it is clear Pitman is being extremely harsh on himself.
But the significance of that final quarter of a mile can never be overstated – Red Rum was not only galloping past a desperately tired Crisp, who had run himself almost to a standstill, he was beginning the journey into the consciousness of the wider public.
The 1973 win was followed by another in 1974 and a famous third in 1977, a year which ended with Rummy walking into the BBC Sports Personality of the Year studio. He had become the People’s Horse.
But he had also helped the long process of saving the Grand National as a sporting institution. Even when Red Rum was rewriting its record books, the Grand National was an event under threat from complicated ownership issues and social unrest.
There had been strikes, a three-day week and a property developer, Bill Davies, bought Aintree and tripled admission prices. Very few came to watch the 1975 race.
But Red Rum appealed to a bigger audience, following his second victory in 1974 with runners-up finishes in ’75 and ’76 before that defining third triumph in ’77. After his heroics, the race had to go on.
“Red Rum probably saved the National,” said Pitman.
When his trainer Ginger McCain died in 2011, Peter O’Sullevan said: “He will always be remembered for Red Rum and rightly so because he and the horse appeared absolutely at the right time and were very much instrumental in saving the National at a period when it was very much in peril.”
But, while Red Rum would go on to win the hearts and minds of the sporting nation, emotions were torn when he overhauled Crisp, a chaser who had arrived from Australia a couple of years earlier, in the closing yards of the 127th running of the great race.
In the build-up to the anniversary of that epic contest, Pitman, now 80, had talked the official Aintree social-media channels through the astonishing finale.
“At the start of the second circuit, we must have been 20 lengths clear,” he recalled. “I could hear Michael O’Hehir [racecourse commentator] say, ‘Crisp and Dick Pitman are 25 lengths in front of the field’. I could not hear another horse. But we jumped the last and we could hear, now, a challenger, which happened to be Red Rum.
“Then, I made a boyish mistake. I should not have tapped him. It was a terrible error, which I have lived with all my life.”
Pitman had “tapped” Crisp with his whip and the horse appeared to veer left, losing valuable ground. He was eventually pipped by three-quarters of a length.
In those days, the winner and placed horses would walk back through the crowds and both Red Rum and his jockey Brian Fletcher, and Crisp and Pitman were given heroes’ receptions. They deserved them.
They had given the world a truly great sporting moment... and the story of Red Rum, the horse a nation came to love, had well and truly begun.
