FEATURE SAM WALEY-COHEN
Sam Waley-Cohen’s achievements as an amateur jockey are unparalleled and his career ended on a perfect note when he won the 2022 Randox Grand National. Ben Cox caught up with Sam and his father Robert to discuss an unforgettable day and what the future holds... A fairytale of Aintree
I f tasked with writing the script, few would dare. In the build-up to the 2022 Randox Grand National, Sam Waley-Cohen had announced that the 174th running of the world’s greatest steeplechase would be his last race as a jockey. Not since 1990 had an amateur rider won the race – when Marcus Armytage triumphed aboard Mr Frisk – and at 50-1, few gave Waley-Cohen’s mount, Noble Yeats, much chance of repeating the feat. However, as the pair strode back into the winner’s enclosure at Aintree Racecourse at around 5.30pm on Saturday 9 April 2022, the scene was fit for a Hollywood blockbuster with an ending verging on the ridiculous. Except this was real life – the culmination of years of hard work, blood, sweat, tears, triumph, failure and everything in between. Noble Yeats had become the first seven-year-old to succeed in the Randox Grand National since Bogskar in 1940, while Waley-Cohen’s name could be etched into the history books as the 42nd amateur jockey to win the race and the first of the 21st century. Waley-Cohen’s own race riding statistics of 75 Jump winners under Rules in Great Britain, plus one on the Flat, one winner in France and over 100 point-to-point winners fail to accurately reflect his phenomenal achievements in the saddle. Especially when you consider that those 75 UK Jump winners include four Grade Ones and a remarkable seven victories over the iconic Grand National fences at Aintree – a record many professional jockeys would swap their own for. Waley-Cohen also retires with four victories at The Festival™, headed by Long Run’s victory in the 2011 Cheltenham Gold Cup, horseracing’s most prestigious
contest. On the same horse, he claimed two victories in the Grade One King George VI Chase – making him the first amateur to succeed in Kempton Park’s Boxing Day spectacular. The combined achievements of Long Run and Noble Yeats also handed Waley-Cohen the unique statistic of being the only amateur jockey to ride winners of both the Cheltenham Gold Cup and Grand National. So when Waley-Cohen zipped up his bag and walked out of the weighing room for the final time, it marked the end of an extraordinary career and one that he and his father Robert freely admit had begun 23 years ago, purely as ‘a bit of fun’. Sam, whose first ride was as a 16-year-old in 1999, says: “We started out point-to-pointing to have a bit of fun,
8 KALENDAR
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