Tiger Roll is not the best horse in Ireland. He is not even the best horse in Gordon Elliott’s stable in County Meath. But he is, beyond reasonable doubt, the most popular racehorse on the planet at present and a burning-hot favourite for the Grand National on Saturday afternoon, when success would make him the first winner of back-to-back Nationals since Red Rum, the greatest Aintree legend of all.
The reasons for Tiger Roll’s popularity are simple: punters love a trier, and when he wins, he wins big. He has lost twice as many races as he has won, 22 times in his 33 starts. Yet anyone who had placed a £10 bet on Tiger Roll in all of his races would now be £850 in profit.
Tiger Roll is one of only a handful of horses that have won at the Cheltenham Festival, the most prestigious meeting of the season, in four different years. He has won races at odds of 25-1, 20-1, 16-1 and also 10-1, when he inched home in last year’s National.
In its 180-year history, only four horses have won consecutive Grand Nationals and none have done so since Red Rum in 1974. But then, no winner has returned to Liverpool in the last 45 years since with as big a chance as Tiger Roll, who will be one of the hottest National favourites of all time.
The hottest, in fact, since Red Rum himself started at 7-2 in 1975 – but finished only second. Tiger Roll was 4-1 on Friday afternoon, but a wave of public support on Saturday could easily force his odds down further by the off-time at 5.15pm. Poethlyn’s record as the shortest-priced National favourite ever, when he started at 11-4 exactly a century ago, could be under threat.
Tiger Roll, though, still has a long way to go to match Red Rum’s record in the Grand National, or the huge place that “Rummy” carved for himself in the affections of the British sporting public.
The race was under threat in 1973 when Red Rum started his run of first-first-second-second-first in five consecutive years, as the huge, flat expanse of Aintree racecourse had been sold to a property developer. By the time Red Rum retired, it had been saved.
“Tiger Roll’s got a lot of the same attributes and they both have the same attitude to racing, they really love what they do,” Mike Dillon, a betting industry veteran who threw the winner’s blanket over Red Rum after his record-breaking third National win in 1977, said this week.
“But reality has to kick in. There will only be one Red Rum. When you look at his record, it will never happen again in the history of the race. He jumped 150 of the fences without ever falling, won three times and was second twice.
“And he was such a massive help in saving the National. We used to do things like taking him to the course for photo shoots with Emlyn Hughes, who was the captain of Liverpool and England at the time. This was a horse that went to the BBC Sports Personality of the Year, pulled up in a horsebox, went into a lift and up to the floor where it was broadcast and just walked onto the stage.”
Red Rum was also a homegrown hero, trained behind a car showroom a few miles from Aintree and often photographed galloping along Southport beach. Tiger Roll’s backstory has a little less romance. He is part of the huge racing operation run by Michael O’Leary, whose long career as the outspoken boss of Ryanair has not made him universally popular.
But Tiger Roll does not know what his betting odds are, or whose colours are on his back. He just keeps running and the punters love him for it.
“It’s the best thing that can happen to the betting industry in the long term,” Dillon says. “Short term hit, long term gain. If he wins, he will be the lead on the news on Saturday night and on the front page of every paper on Sunday. He’ll become the Pied Piper, in the same way that Red Rum did all those years ago.”
