Legendary Grand National horse foaled in Limerick

A BOOK chronicling one of the greatest upsets in horse racing history – Foinavon’s Grand National victory –traces the birth of the horse to County Limerick.

On April 8, 1967 at Aintree racecourse in Liverpool, Foinavon, a 100-1 outsider, sidestepped chaos, extraordinary even by the Grand National’s standards and won the world’s toughest steeplechase.

“It’s one of the first things I can remember – I’m 53 years old,” explained David Owen, the author of the newly published Foinavon: The Story of the Grand National’s Biggest Upset.

The race took place on the day after David’s seventh birthday. While he wasn’t watching the action, a change in the intonation of Michael O’Hehir’s voice as he began his now famous roll call of the fallen horses drew the youngster’s attention to the television screen.

“You can imagine this seven-year-old boy – I was completely spellbound and have never really forgotten it.”

The most dramatic moment of the race, and perhaps of Grand National history, came when a loose horse — Popham Down, who had been hampered and unseated his rider at the first fence — veered dramatically to his right at the 23rd fence. A pile-up ensued.

The undistinguished Foinavon had been lagging so far behind that his jockey, John Buckingham, had sufficient time to steer his mount wide of the melee and find a small gap in the fence to jump cleanly on the outside and go on to win the race.

As part of his research, David, a freelance reporter and a former sports editor of the Financial Times, travelled to Pallasgreen to find out where the horse was foaled. Foinavon was bred from the mare Ecilace by Timothy Ryan.

Timothy ran a dairy farm of 80 acres about a mile away from Pallasgreen village. His family had lived in the area for more than 200 years.

“I eventually found a lady called Jill McCormack, Timothy Ryan’s daughter, who lives there and she showed me the barn. I actually saw the place where the horse stayed for about the first year of his life. He was out on a meadow where you could see the Hill of Nicker.”

The horse was then sold in Dublin and soon found himself in a famous yard, in the company of a horse which would go on to be the most celebrated in Irish racing history.

“He went to Tom Dreaper’s yard where Arkle was,” David explained. “He was bought, not at exactly the same time as Arkle but there were three horses that Anne, Duchess of Westminster bought almost at the same time and those three were Foinavon, Arkle, and Ben Stack. They were named after three mountains in the Scottish Highlands.”

Foinavon, and Susie, the white nanny goat which accompanied him everywhere, became instant celebrities after the National.

Within days, the traffic was being stopped for them in front of Buckingham Palace en route to an audience with the Duchess of Kent. Fan mail arrived addressed to ‘Foinavon, England’.

Foinavon: The Story of the Grand National’s Biggest Upset is available from bloomsbury.com