Bruce Anderson has a vile, ignorant piece in today's Times on the Grand National:

In order for the race to retain its glory and its terror, it is important that a horse should be killed most years and a jockey every ten years or so.

What a fatuous, misleading, misinformed, and deeply offensive sentence.

I have no idea if Mr Anderson has any interest in racing or not, but I find it impossible to believe that he has ever spoken to anyone who has, given how wrong he is, and how sickened those of us for whom horse racing is the ultimate sport are to read such oafish drivel.

I used to think when I heard owners and trainers say before a race that all they cared about was that their horse came back sound, that they were only telling half the story, and that above all they wanted to win. I have now owned three horses. Every time they have run, my only thought has indeed been to hope that they do themselves justice and come back unhurt.

Moreover, it is not just owners who think like that. I have never met a single horse racing enthusiast for whom the idea of an injury to a horse, even one with which they have no connection other than watching it on television, is anything other than deeply upsetting. The idea that injuries to and deaths of horses - let alone of jockeys, an idea posited by Anderson which is so self-evidently grotesque that it does not deserve to be dignified by a rebuttal - is anything other than a terrible, if unavoidable, by-product, is so deeply ignorant, and so totally misses the whole point of jump racing, that it says far more about Anderson's mind-set than it does about those who watch, or participate in, the Grand National.

If Anderson ever dared to show his face at a race meeting I have no doubt he would be chased off the course. Or, perhaps more appropriately, horse-whipped.

(By the way, this is deeply unoriginal but if Clan Royal jumps the whole course tomorrow, he will win. Have a saver on Innox each way.)