A wholesale raft of welfare changes debut in Saturday’s Grand National to give it a 21st century look, but there is one theme in the 176th running that is as old as the race itself: the owner-rider.
When David Maxwell goes to post on Ain’t That A Shame, the horse he bought for the race, he will, at 45, be old enough to have fathered some of his fellow riders but he will not be breaking any age records. The oldest winner was 48-year-old Dick Saunders on Grittar in 1982; the oldest rider to take part, the colourful 68-year-old Tim Durant in 1968. “I’m too young for this race,” he jokes.
Outwardly it might seem that Maxwell was chauffeur-driven from the City to Aintree but it is a lot deeper than that; his family is steeped in racing, brought up in a yard in Northern Ireland where his father was a successful small trainer and stud owner. His sex education was, he says (probably not joking), watching stallions cover mares.
But in February 1983 his mother, Judy, became the focus of one of the 20th century’s greatest racing mysteries, the kidnap of Shergar. Though he was just four at the time, Maxwell remembers it like yesterday.
“When Shergar was taken the kidnappers rang my mother in the middle of the night to demand a ransom,” he recalls. “There was no connection other than the fact that my parents trained, had a couple of stallions themselves and it was Northern Ireland.
“Every time I see Derek Thompson he reminds me of it. The kidnappers would only talk to mum and the world’s media, racing press and Derek Thompson descended on Downpatrick.
“Your memory as a child can be skewed but it felt like standing room only on the lawn. It was the story of the day but isn’t it funny, people’s affection for horses? I guess 3,000 people probably died in the Troubles and, for many, the story which stood out was the kidnapping and shooting of a horse.”
His family bred and, initially, trained the 1988 National winner, Rhyme ’n’ Reason. “The memory of him is as fresh as paint,” he recalls. “Mum would ride him and I’d be on my pony. We stood his sire Kemal and he won a couple of bumpers for Dad. Juliet Reed and John Moreton bought him early in his career to take to Britain.
“He pretty much fell at Becher’s first time, broke a couple of bones in his hock in the process, was plum last, got back into the race, was in front at the last, headed but Rhyme ’n’ Reason was game as a badger and won by four lengths.”
At 16 Maxwell was sent to school in Dorset before going up to Cambridge to read economics. There he hunted the drag, rode out for point-to-point trainer Henry Hill, breaking his jaw in six places one Sunday morning on the Links schooling ground at Newmarket.
“I’d lived pretty high on the hog in Cambridge and couldn’t afford to get a job in London so, foolishly, I set up on my own in real estate investment, finding ways to fund development, though it worked out OK.”
With the wherewithal to do it, he was drawn back in by the horses. Initially in his late twenties he had a few pointers with Richard Pitman. “Then the middle-aged man obsession across my thirties went from two to 10 pointers,” he explains. “Basically what I do is have fun with the nags and I now have about 20 horses spread out between trainers.
“The inflexion point came six or seven years ago when I took on Dave Crosse as my jockey coach. He taught me how to race-ride. I went from being incompetent to competent and at that point he said, ‘I can make you amateur champion’, which he did in 2018/19 and 2019/20. It wasn’t so much a box ticked but more, ‘That’s nice to have something to show for the last 15 years messing around, a certain level of achievement’.
“Since then, honestly, it’s been all about a love of the horses. They’re just such lovely characters. All different but all characters.
“Last year at Cheltenham in January I broke back, for the fourth time, in a competitive Saturday handicap chase. It was 14 abreast to the first, I fell off and made a resolution not to ride in any more competitive Saturday handicaps. I’ve been congratulating myself on having stuck to it but, hang on, the Grand National is the ultimate competitive Saturday handicap. They’ll go sensible to the first? Like hell.
“The issue of National now is it’s a really high-class handicap, not the wacky races it used to be. Hence you get a 4-1 favourite now. Go back to the 1990s and the favourite was 10-1, which reflected chances of getting round.”
His fellow riders, he points out, are way more accepting of him in their ranks than the folk on Twitter. “The whole thing for me is that I do it because I enjoy it,” he stresses. “If I’m not safe the jockeys will tell me, they’d get very angry very quickly, but as long as you’re safe they are completely accepting of anyone who wants a go.
“It’s a privilege as a middle-aged sportsman to sit in proximity to really top-class sportsmen. You’re not one of them because you’re not that good but to be able to sit among them and hear the banter is great. They’re nice characters. They’re young lads and girls at the height of their careers.
“I forget how young they are, they’re in mid-twenties, I’m in my mid-forties. It’s huge privilege to be able to sit with the young on equal terms, not as their boss, sitting as a contemporary. I don’t get any opportunities to do that anywhere else in my life.”
On the wall of his office is a print of a photo-finish from Punchestown in 2020 from when he beat Patrick Mullins by an inch in a champion hunter chase. “In a post-race interview I said, ‘Some days you’re the dog, some days the lamppost, but today was a dog day’, he explains.
“A week later an envelope turned up with the print and on it Patrick had written, ‘To the dog, well done from the lamppost’. It sits alongside a framed tweet the lads in the office framed for me. It says, ‘When is David Maxwell going to get a decent jockey to ride his horses?’ The answer’s the same now as it was then: never.”
He once wrote to the Today programme asking why it never tipped his horses despite him being one of the few jockeys who is an avid listener. “The next day I waited hoping I’d be one of the tips,” he says. “But Russia invaded Ukraine and I don’t think there even was a tip that day.
“When I bought Ain’t That A Shame he was 33-1, now he’s 66-1. It would be clearly better if ridden by Rachael Blackmore but the information is all in the market and they can trade him as they like. But if you’re in the National you can win the National.”
