Saturday’s Midlands Grand National at Uttoxeter was hard to watch. Of 16 runners, 11 pulled up. The 10/3 favourite J’Arrive De L’Est was one of them, fading from contention five out and pulled up shortly after. Second favourite Aworkinprogress (9/2) found nothing from the rear and suffered the same fate.
Isaac Des Obeaux, a 28/1 shot having his first run beyond three and a half miles, galloped relentlessly through the carnage to win by eight lengths.
That is the Midlands National in a nutshell. It happened last year (Mr Vango, 11/1). It happened the year before (Beauport, 18/1). It keeps happening. So we pulled the numbers to see just how systemic this really is.
The favourite graveyard
In the last ten runnings of the Midlands National, the favourite has won precisely once. That was Time To Get Up in 2021 at 3/1 on good to soft ground — the kindest conditions the race has seen in a decade.
The other nine favourites? One third-place finish. One sixth. Two finished further back. Five didn’t finish at all.
The average winning SP since 2015 is 14.2 — roughly a 13/1 shot. This year’s winner was the biggest-priced of the lot at 29.0 decimal. Only Time To Get Up (4.0) and Truckers Lodge (7.0) have won at single-figure prices in the last twelve editions.
It’s not just the Midlands National
We ran the same analysis across all marathon chases (four miles and beyond) since 2015 and the trend holds across the board. Favourites in these races win at 14.4% — less than half the 33.5% strike rate for favourites in all chases.
That’s a massive gap. In a normal chase, backing the favourite blind returns a loss but keeps you in the game. In marathons, you’re lighting money on fire.
The completion rates explain a lot of it. In the average chase, 80% of the field finishes. In marathon chases, it drops to 55%. Saturday’s Midlands National was especially grim at 31% — only five of sixteen got round.
When over a third of the field doesn’t complete the course, form goes out the window. The horses that win these races aren’t necessarily the best on paper. They’re the ones still standing.
The Nicholls marathon puzzle
Paul Nicholls training the winner feels right, but his overall record in 4m+ chases is surprisingly thin: 6 wins from 161 runners (3.7%). He kept sending Truckers Lodge back to the Midlands National year after year — the horse won it in 2020 but finished 7th, 6th, 8th and 9th in subsequent attempts.
Isaac Des Obeaux was a different approach. Harry Cobden suggested the race after winning on the horse at Exeter in December, and Nicholls deliberately kept him fresh rather than running him too soon. The extra trip was untested but the logic was sound — the horse stays forever and doesn’t stop galloping.
Sam Twiston-Davies, who rode Isaac Des Obeaux, actually has a solid record in extreme-distance chases: 6 wins from 44 rides at a 13.6% strike rate. That’s nearly four times Nicholls’ own percentage with different jockeys. Worth noting if you’re looking at marathon chases going forward.
What this means for Aintree
The Grand National is three weeks away, and the same dynamics apply — only more so, with bigger fields and more fences. Average winning SP for the Aintree Grand National since 2015 is 20.5, even higher than the Midlands National’s 14.2.
Last year’s Grand National was won by Nick Rockett at 33/1. Noble Yeats won in 2022 at 50/1. Many Clouds was 25/1 in 2015. Rule The World was 33/1 in 2016.
The takeaway is simple: in marathon chases, the market is consistently wrong. Not occasionally, not in small samples — across a decade of data, favourites fail at twice the rate they do in normal chases. The races are too long, too attritional, and too unpredictable for the form book to hold up.
If you’re going to have a bet in the Grand National, the numbers say to look past the top of the market. The last ten Midlands Nationals just gave us another reminder why.