How Ginger put icing on cake after all the years

The date was 5 April 1997 on a heaving dual carriageway just outside Aintree racecourse.

A constable was doing his best to pacify a crowd of 60,000 who were in the middle of being evacuated from the Grand National when Ginger McCain uttered the one question which tells all you need to know about anyone with the brass neck to utter it.

"Do you realise who I am?" boomed a purple faced McCain as he tried to retrieve his wheels from a car park which had just been shut down because of an IRA bomb scare. The question brought barely a flicker of recognition from the harassed copper.

And no wonder. Twenty years had elapsed since Red Rum won his third National and McCain had slipped from the role of star attraction on racing's biggest day to that of a crusty old eccentric wheeled out to tell Des Lynam how much better it was in the good old days.

In Ginger's world the National fences had been modified to the point at which they were now "for girls and poofs" while his own involvement in the big race had become restricted to saddling a string of no hopers.

But Amberleigh House's gallant defeat of the Jonjo O'Neill-trained Clan Royal propelled McCain back into the big time - thanks to a ride from Graham Lee which will go down as one of the finest in recent Aintree history.

As McCain held court in a press conference, a brief spell amid the happy bedlam of the weighing room provided the perfect illustration of why the National retains such talismanic status among those who earn their living from this unforgiving sport.

The popular Lee wore a quizzical smile which suggested he could scarcely believe he had fulfilled a lifetime ambition, while Clan Royal's rider Liam Cooper managed only an exhausted grimace in the knowledge that things might have been so different had he not dropped his whip five fences from home.