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Jockey who defied cancer to win world’s greatest steeplechase and inspire a movie explains his love of Aintree and the battle to stay healthy 30 years on from his finest hour Idea for a movie. A jockey who is told he will be dead in eight months unless he signs up to treatment with a 35-40% success rate wins the Grand National on a horse who was so badly injured in one of his races that the vet suggested a bullet was the only answer. Too late. Already been done. John Hurt played the rider in a 1983 film. But the tale kept rolling after Bob Champion passed the Aintree finishing post on Aldaniti, 30 years ago this week. It kept going into a new realm of illness, and defiance, and a fund-raising drive against cancer that provided Champion with a second act in life to surpass the first. We are in the kitchen of the yard in Findon, West Sussex, where Aldaniti was trained by Josh Gifford to defy outlandish odds. The 1981 National winner was a talented ex-crock who had restored his Aintree candidacy by trotting up at Ascot in a major trial. Champion had been ravaged by an early form of chemotherapy and was lucky still to be alive, never mind jumping Becher’s Brook. He looks healthy now: nowhere near his 62 years. But to get to Liverpool on Saturday, for the Bob Champion Aintree Legends Charity Race, in which a dozen National-winning ex-jockeys will compete, Aldaniti’s former partner had to survive a second heart attack three weeks ago: 10 years to the day, spookily, after his first. As soft rain falls on the Downs where Nick Gifford took over from his father, Josh, Champion updates his story: “I speak on cruise ships a bit, and I’d come back from Barbados to a really busy week. I went to Stafford that night for the cancer trust, then to a meeting in London, then down to Hove to a dinner, then up to Whitby, then Harrogate. I was knackered when I got home. “A couple of days later I was at home in bed at one o’clock in the morning and had these chest pains. I knew what it was. Thankfully. I had some spray from the first heart attack but I’d never used it. It was 10 years out of date. I sprayed it under my tongue and that saved a lot of damage. “I’ve got a couple of stents [artificial tubes] in there now and the surgeons ballooned the other vessels. It was the same day I had the heart attack 10 years ago – so I’m not going to go to bed in 10 years’ time. I might go and park outside the hospital.” Champion attributes his heart trouble to the effects of his treatment after being diagnosed with testicular cancer in July 1979: “The chemo was very barbaric in those days and it did affect my lungs. There’s no way I can say it gave me the heart attack but some of the vessels were injured by the treatment in those days. I’m alive, that’s the main thing. I wouldn’t have been without the treatment.” Hurt’s character was living the life in a previous golden generation of National Hunt riders. People talk these days of a special crop – AP McCoy, Ruby Walsh and the rest – but Champion’s contemporaries were also vivid figures on winter’s landscape. “I rode with some really good jockeys. People like John Francome, Jonjo O’Neill, Ron Barry, Bob Davies: all great champions,” he says. “Racing’s changed. AP has more than a thousand rides a year. John Francome – fantastic jockey – was lucky if he got 400. They’ve got to be fitter now – or they should be. They’re more professional. We enjoyed life. But they’re at it seven days a week. They’re breathalysed. They can’t really let themselves go on a Saturday night. We’d have a Saturday night out.” But all this crashed with the cancer diagnosis. Jump racing steeled itself to say goodbye. Gifford, though, delivered a psychological gift, promising Champion his job as stable jockey would be waiting for him, even though he doubted that would be the outcome. “They gave me six to eight months to live. If I’d had the cancer 18 months before there’d have been no cure anyway, so I’d have been a goner,” Champion says. “It was eight months to live – or a 35-40% chance of living, with the treatment. The odds weren’t particularly good. I didn’t want to die. But I didn’t realise until they started pumping the stuff in how toxic it was. Jesus, I felt so ill after two days. It was horrendous treatment. Thankfully now we’ve gone from 35-40% to 95% on testicular cancer alone [with early diagnosis]. So that’s how far we’ve come. “Some days you’d rather be dead. I got septicaemia half-way through the treatment. You think you’re drifting away and feel relief. Then they change your blood, get you up and you start the whole thing all over again. “Josh always said my job was there. I know he never really thought I’d live. But he kept giving me the confidence, which I needed. I started riding out when I came out of hospital, but I couldn’t breathe. My lungs had been damaged and the weather was cold, which made it hurt more; so I went to the States, to South Carolina, where the weather was nice and warm. It made things easier. I spent eight months there.” Champion’s first post-cancer winner was on the Flat in Florida in May, 1980, but resuming over jumps in Britain was gruelling, and peppered by setbacks. But by Christmas, Champion was back in the groove. He had never given up on Aldaniti as a National contender, despite the animal’s two serious tendon injuries and fractured hock. He says: “He was a horse I’d always said would win a National one day. I’d been associated with horses who had gone on and won Nationals. I won the Eider Chase on Highland Wedding before he won at Aintree. I rode Rag Trade in his first race over fences. I used to look after Rubstic, who won a National. They all gave me this same feel. They had a low head carriage, were well balanced and were all good jumpers. “He [Aldaniti] broke down so many times. The last time it happened, at Sandown, it was very bad and the vets wanted to put him down. But he was such a great patient. He stood in a box for six months in plaster. That’s hard for a horse. After that Nick Embiricos [his owner] did all the road work. He came back into the yard on 1 January and Josh rode him out every day himself. He thought it was the only way he was going to get him to Liverpool. Josh has terrific hands, because the old horse used to pull very hard. If Josh hadn’t ridden him every day he might not have got there. “When the old horse went to Ascot for the Whitbread Trial he was 16-1 but he absolutely bolted up. He never came off the bridle. I thought – if he’s as good as that on the day, that’s good enough for the National, in my book. He went from 66-1 for the National to 14-1 so he must have been pretty impressive.” Champion refers to Aldaniti as “the old horse” a lot. Their lives, even now, are inseparable. In the race, Aldaniti, a 10-1 shot, beat Spartan Missile, ridden by an amateur, Mr John Thorne, who was killed a year later in a point-to-point. Even in its aftermath the 1981 Grand National was redemptive and tragic by turns. “From the moment I went by the post everything seemed to change in my life – for good and bad, I suppose,” Champion says. “I was still a professional jockey, though. I had to ride in a race an hour later. Part of the job. And I’m glad I did. It should have won, but it didn’t. “Every time I tried to have a glass of champagne the press took it off me for the photograph. The first drink I had was a can of Coke on the motorway going back. Made up for it the next night, though.” Champion trained for a while but his cancer trust became more consuming: “I don’t know how long we believed it would go for, but it got bigger, and we’ve got our own research laboratory, which has been very successful. Our next target is prostate. One in 10 men get prostrate cancer now and hopefully we’ll come up with the goods there.” After the race 30 years ago Champion and Aldaniti stayed together: “I used to see him regularly because he did so much for the cancer trust. Holyrood Castle, Buckingham Palace. He used to go up in the lift at big stores. Terrific temperament. He was wonderful with the public – a nice kind horse who loved the attention.” Aldaniti died of a heart attack in 1997, aged 27. This is one of those National stories (the greatest of them all, to this day) that expresses the full human and equine grandeur of the challenge. The contest itself is a metaphor for what Aldaniti and Champion overcame to be there in the first place, never mind win. No wonder he is almost ever-present on Grand National day: “I’ve only missed one in 40 years – and that was because I had the first heart attack, 10 years ago. I rode in 10. I love going up there. I always walk down to The Chair. It brings back memories. I love the Liverpool people. They go there and they enjoy themselves. “That’s what I like to see.” The Bob Champion Cancer Trust is at bobchampion.org.uk Horse racing Grand National Paul Hayward guardian.co.uk