Red Rum v Crisp: 50 years on from the most gripping Grand National of all

A fter several minutes of almost perfect silence as he made his way around the second circuit in the 1973 Grand National, it was the unmistakable sound of Red Rum’s nostrils that told Richard Pitman he was in trouble. “It was fast ground that day,” Pitman, now 80, says. “You could hear the horses’ hooves, ‘drmmm drmmm, drmmm drmmm’ but Red Rum had flappy nostrils, so when he exhaled there would be a ‘pwwwrrr, pwwwrrr’ and I can still hear those sounds chasing me now. ‘Drmmm drmmm, pwwwrrr pwwwrr’.”

Anyone who is old enough to have watched the epic, breathtaking heroism of Crisps’s failure to win the 1973 Grand National as it happened, this writer included, is likely to have equally indelible memories of perhaps the most gripping piece of racing theatre to unfold at Aintree.

From the moment Pitman and Crisp took the lead after jumping Becher’s for the first time, the drama was unrelenting and instantly accessible. There was no need to understand the intricacies of handicap weights or ideal trips. As just one among many millions watching at home, I neither knew nor cared that Crisp was a champion two-miler stepping up to four-and-a-half or that he was conceding 23lb to Red Rum, the other joint-favourite at 9-1. All that mattered as he set out on the second circuit, nearly a fence in front of his pursuers, was that my 50p each-way bet – what seven-year-old, after all, can resist a horse named after a snack? – was going to be a winner.

A pitch-perfect relay of commentators on the BBC coverage – Peter O’Sullevan to John Hanmer to Julian Wilson and back to O’Sullevan – provided the soundtrack as Crisp pounded on towards Becher’s for the second time, having been left completely alone by the fall of Grey Sombrero at The Chair.