ONE of my earliest television memories is a Grand National of the early 1970s and it still remains my favourite race. This was the first from the new ITV team, where the expert panel of A.P. McCoy, Mick Fitzgerald and Luke Harvey is developing into a top class act.

There are still a few inane questions from some of their team such as “Where will you go next?” after a horse has just won a race that was the long term target.

Imagine if some bloke with a microphone had been waiting on top of Mount Everest to ask the same question to Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953 within five minutes of their monumental achievement.

After this year’s Grand National it was decreed that every horse had to be dismounted so that they could be taken to a kind of equine shower room for washing down and veterinary examinations.

This left the victorious owners with no horse to lead in and the jockey to make the rather meaningless trudge on foot back into the winner’s enclosure.

Returning with the saddle over his arm was more reminiscent of those unfortunate occasions when a horse has met with some terrible outcome. One For Arthur looked in pretty good shape on the television and I wonder if a horse is actually more likely to drop dead after a four-mile race than a three-mile one, for instance. Might we soon see Cheltenham go the same way?

I hope not, because leading a horse into the winner’s enclosure is an owner’s only recorded physical contact with the animal in which they have invested varying combinations of money, time and affection.

I am aware that the Grand National has a bigger audience but that is not a commendable basis for making such decisions.

Why not make a quick assessment of the winner and if all is not well, have on standby some type of “Popemobile” so that Derek Fox and Lucinda Russell could at least be above ground level and therefore visible to the crowd who were supposed to be acknowledging their success.