It was perhaps for the best that Willie Mullins did not make it to the top of Ayr’s grandstand in time to see the first 30 seconds of the Scottish Grand National. Mr Incredible, the shortest-priced runner among his six-strong challenge for the richest race left in the 2023-24 jumps season, in effect refused to race, while another, We’llhavewan, unseated his jockey at the first. And even as Mullins’s six-year-old Macdermott flashed past the winning post neck-and-neck with Surrey Quest, the trainer’s first instinct was that his horse had been touched off.
When the judge blew up the photograph, though, it showed that Macdermott and Danny Mullins had scraped home by a nose at 18-1, while the three other runners from the yard that made it to the second fence eventually finished fourth, fifth and sixth. In all, the Scottish National alone added around £130,000 to his prize money haul in the UK this year, and moved Mullins to the verge of becoming the first Irish trainer since Vincent O’Brien in 1954 to win the British National Hunt championship.
