Twenty-two runners went to post for the Fox Hunters’ Chase here on Thursday, the first of three races this week over the Grand National fences, but two failed to return after both Marasonnien and Clonbanan Lad collapsed after being pulled up during the race.
Neither horse was one of the three fallers during the race, in which three more riders were unseated and another seven, including Patrick Mullins, on Marasonnien, and Jody Sole, on Clonbanan Lad, pulled up.
“Clonbanan Lad and Marasonnien were pulled up during the Fox Hunters’ Steeple Chase by their jockeys but later collapsed,” Professor Chris Proudman, the veterinary adviser to Aintree, said after the race. “Despite the immediate attention of veterinary professionals [the horses] were not able to be saved. Neither incident was associated with a fall.
“You can never remove all risk completely from any sport, including horse racing, but from 90,000 runners each year British racing has a fatality rate of less than 0.2%, which research found is far lower than horses simply exercising in a field. This is down from 0.3% over the last 15 years, and we must keep working to see that continue to decrease.”
On The Fringe ran out an easy winner of the Fox Hunters’, completing a double in the two big hunter chases of the year, at Cheltenham and Aintree, for the second year running.
Later on the card, Donald McCain recorded an emotional victory at the end of a difficult season when Katachenko took the Red Rum Chase, named in honour of the three-times Grand National winner trained by his late father, Ginger.
McCain had sent out just 50 winners in 2015-16 before his success on Thursday, and also lost one of his yard’s most significant owners in October when Clare and Paul Rooney removed about 60 horses from the stable.
“This race is one of those that I’ve always wanted to win,” McCain said. “It’s been a challenging season all right, but I think we proved today that we’ve done nothing wrong and that we’ve sorted out any issues that we had.”
