Red Rum's Grand National Wins: The Full Aintree Record
Red Rum's Grand National wins in 1973, 1974 and 1977, his two seconds, the trainer Ginger McCain, Southport sands and his grave at Aintree in England.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Grand National23 min read
- Grand National wins
- 3
- Grand National runs
- 5
- Foaled
- 1965
- Died, aged 30
- 1995
Red Rum ran in five Grand Nationals and was never out of the first two. He won in 1973, 1974 and 1977 and finished second in 1975 and 1976, all for the trainer Ginger McCain, who kept him in a converted yard behind a car showroom in Southport and exercised him on the sands. Three wins at Aintree is the most by any horse in the race's history, and as things stood at the 2026 meeting it was still a mark nobody had matched.
Those are the facts most people come looking for. The detail is better. He won the first by three-quarters of a length after catching a horse who had led by a street, the second under twelve stone, and the third at the age of twelve by twenty-five lengths. He had been bred to sprint, ran his first race over five furlongs at Aintree as a two-year-old, and was later found to have a chronic bone disease in a foot. He died in October 1995 and is buried beside the winning post of the course he made his own.
Red Rum's Grand National wins and seconds at a glance
| Year | Age | Weight carried | Rider | Result | Winner or runner-up |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1973 | 8 | 10st 5lb | Brian Fletcher | Won by three-quarters of a length | Crisp second |
| 1974 | 9 | 12st 0lb | Brian Fletcher | Won by seven lengths | L'Escargot second |
| 1975 | 10 | 12st 0lb | Brian Fletcher | Second, beaten fifteen lengths | L'Escargot won |
| 1976 | 11 | 11st 10lb | Tommy Stack | Second, beaten two lengths | Rag Trade won |
| 1977 | 12 | 11st 8lb | Tommy Stack | Won by twenty-five lengths | Churchtown Boy second |
Read down the weight column and the shape of his career is there. A lightly weighted horse in 1973, he was raised to the top of the handicap after winning and stayed near it. He carried twelve stone twice, and his two defeats both came after he had been asked to give lumps of weight to good horses. He was beaten only by a dual Cheltenham Gold Cup winner and by a horse carrying many pounds less.
The handicapper's view of him is the thread running through all five runs. In the Grand National every horse is given a weight according to its rating, so improvement is punished rather than rewarded, and a winner comes back the following spring carrying the consequences of what it did last time. Red Rum arrived in 1973 rated as an ordinary handicap chaser and left Aintree rated as one of the best staying chasers in training. From that point the handicap never let him go. He did not run off anything close to 10st 5lb again, and the fact that his third win came off 11st 8lb at the age of twelve is the part of the record that takes the longest to appreciate. How those figures are arrived at is set out in our guide to the National handicap.
- 5Grand Nationals run
- 3Wins
- 2Second places
- 12Age at his third win
His record in the Grand National from 1973 to 1977. He was withdrawn on the eve of the 1978 race and never ran in it again.
Our page on Grand National records sets his three wins beside the other marks in the race's history. This one is about how he got them.
1973 and Crisp: twenty-three pounds and three-quarters of a length
The horse everyone watched in 1973 was not Red Rum. Crisp, an Australian chaser trained by Fred Winter and ridden by Richard Pitman, was a top-class two-miler who had come to England with a reputation and lived up to it. He carried twelve stone, the top weight. Red Rum had 10st 5lb.
Crisp went off in front and jumped the National fences as if they were hurdles. By Becher's Brook on the second circuit he was far clear, and the race looked over. Red Rum, under Brian Fletcher, was the only horse giving chase with any conviction, and even he looked to be running for second as they crossed the Melling Road for the final time.
Four hundred and ninety-four yards
That is the run-in from the last fence to the winning post, one of the longest in British racing, and in 1973 it decided the race. Two fences from home Crisp was still a long way in front. At the last he was tiring, and once he turned for home and the elbow came into view he began to wander off a true line. Pitman changed his whip hand and the horse hung away from it.
Twenty-three pounds is a great deal of weight to carry over four and a half miles, and it told in the final two hundred yards rather than anywhere earlier. Red Rum closed with every stride. He caught Crisp a few yards from the line and won by three-quarters of a length. That was the first and only moment all afternoon in which he had his head in front.
The time was 9 minutes 1.9 seconds, the fastest the National had been run. That record stood until Mr Frisk's run on fast ground in 1990, seventeen years later. Both of the first two home broke the previous record, so Crisp's performance in defeat would have been a record winning time in almost any other year. Our guide to how long the National takes explains why times from that era cannot be set directly against modern ones: the fences, the ground management and the start have all changed.
The 1973 race is remembered as Crisp's as much as Red Rum's, and that is fair. Red Rum was a very good horse that day. Crisp was a great one, beaten by the weight and by the length of the run-in.
There is a detail in the result that gets lost. Red Rum was an eight-year-old having his first run over the National fences, and he jumped them for four and a half miles without a serious error while chasing a horse who was setting a record pace in front of him. Most horses asked to do that either fall or stop. Fletcher asked him for a long, sustained effort from the second-last and got it, which is the first evidence that the Aintree record was going to be about more than one lucky afternoon.
1974: twelve stone, and Ayr three weeks later
A National winner goes up in the weights. Red Rum went to the top of them. In 1974 he carried twelve stone, the same burden that had beaten Crisp a year earlier, and he won by seven lengths from L'Escargot. Brian Fletcher rode again.
The horse he beat matters here. L'Escargot had won the Cheltenham Gold Cup in 1970 and 1971, which made him one of the best staying chasers of the decade, and the handicapper separated the pair by a single pound: 12st 0lb against 11st 13lb. Beating a dual Gold Cup winner by seven lengths on those terms, off the maximum, is the single best performance on Red Rum's record, and it is the one that tends to be overlooked because the finish was never in doubt.
It was also harder than it looked. Under 10st 5lb a good horse can win a National with a clear run and some luck. Under twelve stone a horse has to be outstanding, because every pound above about eleven stone tells over the last mile at Aintree. Red Rum became the first horse since Reynoldstown in 1935 and 1936 to win consecutive Nationals.
The Scottish double
Three weeks later McCain sent him to Ayr for the Scottish Grand National, a race of a little over four miles over ordinary park fences, much smaller and more forgiving than Aintree's. He won that too by four lengths, beating the high-class Proud Tarquin, ridden by the amateur John Lawrence, later Lord Oaksey. No other horse has won the Aintree and Scottish Nationals in the same season.
The double asks a lot of a horse. Two marathon handicap chases inside a month, on courses that ride nothing like each other, with no real time between them for a horse to put back the condition the first race took out. Running a horse again that soon after a National would be unusual for a modern trainer, and most would not consider it. He came out of both races sound.
It is the one achievement on his record that nobody has matched in half a century, and the least celebrated. Part of the reason is that the Scottish National is a different kind of test: four miles and a furlong or so of park fences at Ayr, demanding stamina but nothing like the jumping precision Aintree asks for. Winning it is not the harder half of the double. Winning it three weeks after Aintree, having carried twelve stone round Aintree, is.
1975 and 1976: two seconds under big weights
Defeat did not diminish him. The two seconds tell you as much about Red Rum as the wins do, and more about the handicap.
In 1975 he carried twelve stone again and finished second, beaten fifteen lengths by L'Escargot, the horse he had beaten the year before. L'Escargot, ridden by Tommy Carberry and trained in Ireland by Dan Moore, ran off 11st 3lb, eleven pounds less than Red Rum, and was having his fourth ride round the National course: brought down at the third fence in 1972, third in 1973, second in 1974, first in 1975. He had worked his way up the placings in the race while Red Rum worked his way up the weights. On the day, Red Rum ran his race and met a better-handicapped horse. That afternoon was Fletcher's last ride on him in the National. The partnership ended afterwards, with McCain and Fletcher giving differing accounts of why, and it is not a dispute worth taking sides in at this distance.
In 1976, with Tommy Stack riding for the first time in the race, he carried 11st 10lb and was beaten two lengths by Rag Trade, trained by Fred Rimell and ridden by John Burke. Red Rum led on the run-in and was caught near the line by a horse getting weight from him.
What the seconds add
Two seconds in two years, under weights that few horses could carry round Aintree at all, are what turned him from a dual winner into something more. The handicapper treated him as the best horse in the race every year from 1974 onwards, and every year he justified the rating by finishing first or second. A horse that wins three Nationals has had some luck. A horse that is first or second in five consecutive runnings has not been lucky every time.
There is a second point in those two defeats. Both came in races he might have won with a few pounds off his back, and neither came because he had stopped staying or stopped jumping. He was beaten by arithmetic, which is what the handicap is designed to do to a horse as good as he was.
1977: the third win at twelve years old
He was twelve. Most chasers of that age are winding down and a good many have already been retired. Red Rum came to Aintree in 1977 with two defeats in the race behind him and a season that had not suggested anything special, and plenty of people thought his Aintree days had gone.
Tommy Stack rode him. They were prominent from the start, moved up to challenge before the Canal Turn on the second circuit, took the lead and then simply drew away over the final few fences. He won by twenty-five lengths from Churchtown Boy. It was his widest winning margin at Aintree and it came off 11st 8lb at an age when weight normally tells hardest.
Churchtown Boy deserves a sentence of his own. He had won the Topham Trophy over a single circuit of the National fences forty-eight hours earlier, and he came back on the Saturday off 10st 0lb, twenty-two pounds below Red Rum. Finishing second after that is a considerable effort rather than the walk-on part the margin suggests. He was simply up against a horse having one of the great Aintree afternoons.
The reception was extraordinary even by Aintree standards. Racegoers broke onto the course and pressed round him as he was led in to unsaddle, and the closing commentary from the BBC has been replayed so often since that the 1977 race is the one most people picture when they hear his name.
The same afternoon, a first
The 1977 National was also the first in which a woman rode, Charlotte Brew on Barony Fort. She got round the first circuit and most of the second before her horse refused four from home. Her ride belongs to the history of that afternoon as surely as his does. Two firsts on one card.
Why the third win carried further than the other two
The 1973 and 1974 wins made him a very good racehorse. The 1977 win made him a national figure, and the difference is mostly about timing. He won it at twelve, after two years of being beaten, in front of a crowd that had been told for several springs that the race itself might not survive. A story that neat does not come along often, and the race needed one.
Bred to sprint: County Kilkenny, Quorum and Mared
Red Rum was foaled in 1965 at Rossenarra Stud near Kells, County Kilkenny, and bred by Martyn McEnery. His sire was Quorum, a good miler, and his dam was Mared. His name came from the last three letters of each: the RED from Mared and the RUM from Quorum. Building a name out of the parents' names is common practice in the thoroughbred studbook, and the restrictions on what a racehorse may be called are set out in our page on how racehorses are named.
Nothing in that pedigree suggested a stayer, let alone a four-and-a-half-mile one. Quorum's stock tended to be quick rather than durable. A horse bred that way is meant to run five or six furlongs, and the first part of Red Rum's career was spent doing exactly that.
A dead heat at Aintree, and a famous neighbour
His first race was a five-furlong selling race on the flat at Aintree in April 1967, during the Grand National meeting, and he dead-heated for first. He was two years old. The same meeting produced Foinavon's National, the most chaotic running in the race's history, so within a couple of days the course staged its most freakish winner and the first race of its most famous horse, and nobody paid any attention to the second.
He was bought and broken in by Tim Molony, the former champion jumps jockey and Champion Hurdle winner, who trained him on the flat. Besides the Aintree dead heat he won over seven furlongs at Warwick and at Doncaster as a two-year-old, and Lester Piggott rode him twice. He then went jumping. Over the next few years he passed through the yards of Bobby Renton and Tony Gillam, mainly in Yorkshire, and through more than one ownership, among them Lurline Brotherton, who had already owned a National winner in Freebooter in 1950 and who sent Red Rum to the sales before he could give her a second. Across his whole career, flat and jumping together, he ran a hundred times for twenty-four wins, and he never fell in any of them. He was a sound, useful, unexceptional handicap chaser. Nobody mentioned Aintree.
He was sold at the Doncaster sales in August 1972.
- 1965Foaled at Rossenarra Stud in County Kilkenny, by Quorum out of Mared.
- 1967Dead-heats for first in a five-furlong selling race at Aintree as a two-year-old, trained by Tim Molony.
- 1967 to 1972Runs on the flat, over hurdles and then over fences for several trainers and owners, mainly in Yorkshire.
- 1972Sold at the Doncaster sales to Ginger McCain, acting for the owner Noel Le Mare.
- 1973Wins the Grand National at the first attempt, off 10st 5lb.
The main stages of his career before his first Grand National, taken from the published record.
Ginger McCain, Noel Le Mare and the sands at Southport
The man who bought him was a Southport car dealer and part-time taxi driver who trained a handful of horses behind his showroom on Upper Aughton Road in Birkdale. Donald McCain, known to everyone as Ginger, had never had a horse remotely of this class. He bought Red Rum at Doncaster's August sale in 1972 for 6,000 guineas, on behalf of Noel Le Mare, an elderly Liverpool businessman whose long-held ambition was to own a Grand National winner and who, in the version of the story McCain told for the rest of his life, had first met his trainer as a passenger in his taxi.
The stable and the beach
McCain's yard had no gallops. He worked his horses on the beach at Southport, using the long, firm sands at low tide, which was unusual for a jumps trainer in an era when almost everyone else used turf gallops in the country. The sand gave a surface with give in it and no hills, and it allowed long, steady work at a time of year when inland ground is often too soft for it.
| Role | Person | Part in the story |
|---|---|---|
| Breeder | Martyn McEnery | Bred him at Rossenarra Stud in County Kilkenny |
| Owner | Noel Le Mare | Owned him for all five of his Nationals |
| Trainer | Ginger McCain | Bought him in 1972 and trained him from Southport |
| Rider, 1973 to 1975 | Brian Fletcher | Won in 1973 and 1974, second in 1975 |
| Rider, 1976 and 1977 | Tommy Stack | Second in 1976, won in 1977 |
Soon after he arrived at Birkdale he was found to be lame. The diagnosis was pedal osteitis, a chronic inflammation of the pedal bone inside the hoof, which can finish a racing career and which does not go away. McCain's response was to walk and gallop him in the sea as well as on the sand, and the cold salt water was credited by the stable with easing the inflammation enough for the horse to train hard.
What is documented and what is stable legend
The condition is well documented, and so is the use of the beach and the sea. Whether the sea water treated the inflammation or simply allowed a sore horse to work in comfort while the bone settled is interpretation rather than evidence. McCain believed it; the horse stayed sound through five Nationals and a Scottish National; there was never anything resembling a controlled comparison. Treat the cure as the explanation the trainer gave rather than a proven mechanism.
The rest of the Southport story needs no hedging. A horse kept in a converted stable block behind a car showroom, trained on a public beach by a man who sold Fords, beat the best staying chasers in Britain and Ireland over the most demanding course in the sport, three times. Set against the big professional yards of Lambourn and the Cotswolds, that was most of the reason the public took to him.
Why Aintree suited him when other courses did not
Red Rum did not win everything. His form away from Aintree was good without being outstanding, and he was never a Cheltenham Gold Cup horse. At Aintree he was something else entirely, and that gap between the two is the most interesting thing about his record. Several explanations hold up.
Jumping
He jumped quickly and economically. A horse that gets in too close to a National fence loses momentum on landing; one that stands off too far risks a fall, because the landing side of several of these fences drops away. Red Rum met his fences right, lost very little in the air and was away again immediately. He did not fall in a National in five attempts, and he did not have a serious mistake in any of them either. The fences in his day were stiffer and more upright than the modern ones, with rigid timber cores and steeper drops on landing, and the full account of how they were rebuilt is in our guide to the Grand National fences.
The course, the ground and the run-in
Aintree is flat, wide and galloping, with none of the undulations of Cheltenham, and it rewards a horse that can hold one rhythm for a very long way. Red Rum liked good or good-to-soft ground, which is what April at Aintree usually produced. Bred for speed and trained into a stayer, he had enough of both to be travelling at the Melling Road when other horses were struggling, and enough left for a run-in that has broken more good horses than any fence on the course. The shape of the race from the start to the elbow is covered in our explainer on how the race is run.
Experience of the drops
By 1977 he had jumped the National course more times than almost any horse in the field. That counts for more at Aintree than at an ordinary track, because the drops, the angles and the Canal Turn are unlike anything a horse meets elsewhere. He knew where the fences were, how they rode and what was on the other side of them.
The race he helped to save
In the mid-1970s the Grand National was in genuine trouble. The 1973 meeting was the last run by the Topham family, who had held Aintree for generations, and the course passed to a local property developer, Bill Davies. Crowds were already falling. In 1975 Davies trebled admission prices and the National was watched by the smallest crowd anyone could remember, on a course where redevelopment looked more likely than racing.
From 1976 the meeting was run under an agreement with Ladbrokes, with John Hughes as clerk of the course, while Davies still owned the land. That arrangement kept the race going for seven years without settling anything, and each spring brought the same question about the following one. The uncertainty ended only in December 1983, when the Jockey Club bought the course outright from Davies.
What a horse can and cannot do for a race
Red Rum's five runs fall precisely inside that period. The 1973 finish with Crisp was one of the great sporting afternoons on British television. The 1974 win under twelve stone, the two seconds, and then the third win in 1977 kept the National on front pages and in living rooms through the years when its future was least secure, and gave people who never watched another race a reason to watch this one.
It would be too much to say he saved it. The campaign to secure the course had many supporters, and the sponsorship that followed from 1984 mattered more to the balance sheet than any horse could. But a race nobody is talking about is much easier to sell for housing than a race with a household name attached to it, and for most of those years he was the name. The course as it stands now, with its two circuits and its modern fences, is described in our Aintree racecourse guide.
Retirement, and the fame that came after the racing
He was being prepared for a sixth National in 1978. On the eve of the race he was found to have a hairline fracture of a bone in his foot and was withdrawn. He never ran again, and the decision looks better with every passing decade: he left the course unbeaten by it.
Retirement made him more famous rather than less. He opened shops and supermarkets, led parades, appeared on television, switched on the Blackpool Illuminations and came back to Aintree every April to lead the National field onto the course. For something like twenty years he was the only racehorse a great many people in Britain could name, and he was recognised by people who had never watched a race in their lives.
That is a strange kind of celebrity for an animal, and it rested on one afternoon in particular rather than on the record as a whole. Ask most people what Red Rum did and the answer involves three Nationals; ask which one they remember and it is 1977, with the crowd on the course.
Death and the memorials at Aintree
Red Rum died on 18 October 1995, at the age of thirty. He was buried at Aintree, beside the winning post of the Grand National course, and the grave is marked, tended and visited. It faces the finishing line, which was deliberate.
A bronze statue of him stands at the racecourse, and a race at the April meeting, the Red Rum Handicap Chase, carries his name. Ginger McCain kept training and won a fourth National with Amberleigh House in 2004, which made him joint record holder among trainers. His son Donald won the race with Ballabriggs in 2011. Father and son, five Nationals between them, from a yard that started behind a car showroom.
Thirty is a long life for a thoroughbred. He spent seventeen of those years retired and in public, which is why so many people who never saw him race have a clear memory of him.
Burying a horse at a racecourse is not common, and the position of this grave says something about what Aintree thought it owed him. It is not in a paddock or a corner of the stable yard. It is at the winning post, on the line, where the race is decided and where the television cameras point every April.
How three wins compares with everything since
Two horses have won it twice since. Tiger Roll took the 2018 and 2019 runnings for Gordon Elliott and Gigginstown House Stud, off 10st 13lb and then 11st 5lb, six pounds more, and won the second by the wider margin: two and three-quarter lengths against a head. The 2020 race was not run, he did not contest the 2021 renewal, and the question of a third was never put to him. I Am Maximus, trained by Willie Mullins and ridden by Paul Townend, won in 2024 off 11st 6lb, was beaten by his stablemate Nick Rockett in 2025, and won again in 2026 off 11st 12lb. First, second, first in three years is the pattern Red Rum set between 1974 and 1977, and I Am Maximus is the first horse since him to lose a National and then win it back.
| Horse | Wins | Years | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red Rum | 3 | 1973, 1974, 1977 | Also second in 1975 and 1976 |
| Tiger Roll | 2 | 2018, 2019 | Consecutive wins; no run in 2020 or 2021 |
| I Am Maximus | 2 | 2024, 2026 | Second in 2025; first since Red Rum to win it back |
| Reynoldstown | 2 | 1935, 1936 | Last consecutive winner before Red Rum |
| Manifesto | 2 | 1897, 1899 | Carried 12st 7lb to win in 1899 |
Why the record has stood for half a century
Three things work against a repeat, and none of them is about the quality of the horses. The handicap is compressed more tightly than it was, so a winner is reassessed sharply and runs off a mark that makes a second win hard and a third very hard. The modern fences are more forgiving, which sounds like a help but is not: more horses complete, fewer races are won by attrition, and a specialist jumper gains less of an edge than Red Rum did over rivals who were falling. And the field has been capped at 34 runners since 2024, a safety measure explained in our page on the safety limit on the field, which raises the average standard of the race a previous winner has to beat.
Red Rum was not the best steeplechaser of his generation. L'Escargot had two Gold Cups and Crisp was probably the better horse on any other course in the country. What Red Rum had was an exact fit between one animal and one set of fences, held for five consecutive years, at the precise moment the race needed somebody to care about it. The rest of our horse racing guides for readers in England are gathered on the England hub.