The Sporting Life Racing Podcast team reflected on the Randox Grand National in this week’s episode.
Ed Chamberlin presented the meeting on ITV and was feeling positive about the day when he drove home on Saturday evening.
“After a Grand National show you're frazzled, completely frazzled. It’s hard to explain,” he said.
"It’s much harder than anything I do, much harder than any football programme I ever presented. It’s a huge honour, only eight people have ever presented it for terrestrial TV but it’s also really difficult.
“Your head is full of scrambled egg as you come off air. A million things are going through your mind. I was thinking what a great job they’d done at Aintree, John Pullin with that ground having not had a drop of rain for three weeks or so. I thought that was fairly remarkable.
“Dickon White and his team had done a great job in putting on a fabulous show. Cheltenham get plenty of criticism, but I don’t think Aintree gets enough praise for the crowds and the show they put on.
“I was hoping those two horses were OK, obviously, but I’m focused on the ITV show and don’t know what’s really gone on. We want the Grand National show to have plenty of nostalgia, for people to feel young again, the Champions music, the VTs that we’d done, Daryl Jacob did a lovely piece with Intense Raffles for us.
“I thought Alice with the horses before the race was simply sensational, Matt Chapman’s interviews will live long in the memory. The one with Sir Alex Ferguson was brilliant and the one with Willie Mullins where Willie cracked was great TV really.
“I thought it was a really good Grand National. I hadn’t looked at social media and enjoyed it a lot more than I did a couple of years ago when I sat in the car to drive home and felt horrendous if I’m honest.
“In 2017, when I presented my first National, I felt horrendous too. It didn’t go anything like I expected it to and then we won an award for it but on Saturday I felt pretty good about the whole thing really.”
The viewing figures showed a drop of nearly one million from 2024 but the audience share remained strong.
Does Chamberlin feel the general public are losing interest in the race?
“Yes and no. On the face of it 5.3million, which isn’t the consolidated figure, these days you consolidate with digital and everything else that goes with modern broadcasting, is very disappointing when you think of where the Grand National was,” he said.
“You have to take it on the chin, you’ve got to accept it. It is a problem for me. I’ve said it for a long time that our successes in the eight years that we’ve done it and been the custodians for the rights have been the Cheltenham Festival, Royal Ascot, York, Goodwood and other big meetings.
"The problems for me have been the Derby and the Grand National. The days of those big audiences for them have gone and secondly both races don’t resonate like they used to. The Grand National isn’t the race it was. To quote Brough Scott in a brilliant article in the Sunday Times this week, ‘it’s not the race it was but it's the race it is now that matters’.
“I can go on and on and try to explain the audience but it’s very straightforward really. Our biggest audience was 9.6million in 2019 and the share of the audience is bigger now than it was then.
“The National is still hugely popular, the problem is that not enough people are at home watching TV and why would they be on the first Saturday of the school holidays and it’s blazing sunshine.
“We had 40% viewer share for the show and 60% for the Grand National. You’d take that all day long. Back in the day that would have equated to an enormous audience, but these are very different times.”
Fran Berry watched the race unfold from Ireland.
“I was at Bellewstown Racecourse for an evening meeting. There was a good crowd there, the easterly wind would go through you despite the sun, but any racegoer who was there was on the bank at the back of the parade ring watching the National.
“When you’re at an Irish racecourse watching Irish horses fight out the finish, you’re going to get a good cheer and there was one for the winner and more so the second I Am Maximus who was I think was very popular in the market as well.
“The result, then the emotion from Willie Mullins that we saw with Patrick, that’s not something we see often. He's a little bit of an iceman, a cool customer, and the whole occasion got to him and I think that lifted the result.
“The way the race went for Nick Rockett too. He was an ante-post drifter which was interesting given his Bobbyjo and Thyestes wins. He did bomb out in the Irish National last year maybe that was a factor but there was a lot going on watching it from afar.
“I was watching it on the big screen and for that nine minutes and six seconds no one was speaking. It’s still got that enthralment. I know it’s changed in every way, shape or form from what we know it used to be but for a non-hardened racegoer it’s still a great spectacle.”
And for Graham Cunningham the post-race scenes with the winning trainer and rider struck a chord.
“I absolutely loved it. Patrick is Willie and Jackie’s only child. We have one son, and I’ve watched him playing sport and there’s absolutely nothing like it. I cannot imagine watching your only son excel on a stage like that," he said.
“I thought it was spellbinding tele. Matt Chapman did a great job, he handled that with real sensitivity, good timing and good humour, take all the politics out of it and look at that.
“It was wonderful tele for a wonderful achievement. That dad and lad angle plays so, so, strongly, parent and child, Jackie as well, that family angle. I thought that was the moment of the meeting by far it and it will take some topping to be the moment of the season too.”
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