Grand National Interview: Buy into wise Williams

Victory by a goal or two would have been heavy metal, but 3-0 was thrash metal. Long before Liverpool’s swarm-and-suffocate job on Manchester City on Wednesday, Pep Guardiola, speaking back in 2016 about Jurgen Klopp, said: ‘When he talks about his football being heavy metal, I understand completely, it is so aggressive.’

If you were to form a heavy metal band from the Grand National entries, then the frontman would be Buywise, not for his aggression – how can it be when his career of tidying up rather than fronting up in races paints a picture of a pacifist? – but for the character and colour that he’s implied and we’ve contrived which portrays him as a ‘bad boy’ of jumps’ racing. It’s a meeting of minds, and what occupies our mind is wondering what goes through his mind.

A healthy mind in a healthy body

But athletic ability is as much about the body as the mind, one influencing the other, and that’s a cornerstone of Klopp’s philosophy. Klopp is so appreciated by Liverpool, the club and the city, because he’s so appreciative of Liverpool, of its heritage and history as a sporting switchboard, as a home for football above all but also the home of the Grand National and, some say, the home of the modern Olympics.

Thirty years before the new-fashioned Games, introduced in Athens in 1896, John Hulley was organising Olympic festivals in his home town of Liverpool, drawing a crowd of 15,000. Hulley believed that physical and intellectual supremacy went hand in hand, a logic that became a legacy, as inscribed on his gravestone in Toxteth Park Cemetery is the motto Mens Sana in Corpore Sano. A healthy mind in a healthy body.      

The health-cum-wealth warning that has always followed Buywise around is connected to his mind, with an apparent lack of focus being brought sharper into focus by several seasons as a hobby horse, his particular hobby being a fair impression of The Bishop in Monty Python, by arriving just too late, so much so that ‘doing a Buywise’ has become part of the pundit’s phrasebook.

But freedom of expression requires freedom of movement, regardless of psyche, and there’s a reason why Buywise has been dragging his heels, one which makes him a heavy metal hero literally and not just figuratively.    

"He’s got metalwork in his back legs which has plagued him for years,’ explained his trainer, Evan Williams. But a plague can pass, and could things, at last, at the age of eleven, be slotting into place?      

"From November time we were looking at him working at home and just thought he was moving better. I haven’t got a reason for it but I knew he was moving a lot better than he used to.

"He then had a couple of runs and didn’t show a lot, and I thought that perhaps he was moving better because he was looking after himself, almost holding back, so I came round to thinking that the old boy might just have gone."

But the old boy, in amongst old boys, had a new lease of life at Sandown in January. "I wouldn’t have gone down the veterans’ route if I didn’t think he was a way past his best,’ admits Williams. "I still didn’t really expect he’d show the improvement in his movement on the course like he did that day. I just thought he looked a different horse."

It was as if he’d finally offloaded his heavy case at the check-in desk, as the veterans’ chase at Sandown was like Buywise without the baggage: no lapses in concentration, no lapses in jumping, and responding on request to beat subsequent winner Pete The Feat by two lengths, with a further three lengths back to Gas Line Boy, who was fourth in last year’s National.   

What a finish! Buywise surges home under Leighton Aspell to take the Veterans' Final and finally claim a big prize at @Sandownpark. Runner-up Pete The Feat so brave at 14 #brilliantrace

Today's results ➡️ https://t.co/7iJOPsvjqx pic.twitter.com/9yyCS9PSny

— Racing UK (@Racing_UK) January 6, 2018

Fire reignited, Buywise was effectively put on the back-burner, to simmer over hurdles, so as not to add any harmful heat to his handicap mark for the National. Again at Sandown, a month later, he finished eleventh but threatened more into the home straight, in a strong event won by Cheltenham Festival runner-up Topofthegame.

"If you look at the replay it was a very good run," said Williams. "It was very deep ground, and he moved into that race quite beautifully, until he got bumped around. He’d never shown any form like that over hurdles before; in fact, he was always a very poor hurdler. That really convinced me that, at last, he’s moving as he should, as opposed to how he used to."

That was the last service stop for Buywise on the road to Aintree, already programmed into his SatNav history, if not in the ‘favourites’ section, as it didn’t seem to his liking the first time.

"That’s the most horrible horse I’ve ever ridden and I’ll never ride him in anything again."

According to legend, of a legend, Mercy Rimell once recalled that John Francome, after bringing up the rear, last of the ten finishers, aboard Rag Trade in the 1975 National, said to her: "That’s the most horrible horse I’ve ever ridden and I’ll never ride him in anything again." The following year, partnered by John Burke, Rag Trade won the race by four lengths, from no less than Red Rum.

Whether it was an issue of body or mind, Rag Trade was transformed from his first experience of the National to his second, which, amongst other lessons in Aintree history, including from L’Escargot, Royal Athlete, Mon Mome and Silver Birch, act as lights on the runway for Buywise as he goes again once more unto the Becher’s Brook, dear friends, once more.

When he lined up in 2016, expectations were low, to say the least: "To be brutally honest, I never thought that the horse stayed well enough, and I never thought he’d jump around. He didn’t strike me as a National horse at all. I thought he was a two-and-a-half miler, where they went quicker and you could give him a chance to warm up, and try to get there when everything else is coming back. The ground at Aintree that day was wrong for him, in fact everything was wrong, but I just took it as meaning he wasn’t a Grand National horse."

Buywise jumped around, but he stayed only in his own time, never in the heat of the race, checking in twelfth. But times change, as do horses, and the detectable difference in Buywise this season, in his action at home and his all-action display in that veterans’ chase – "I thought at Sandown all he did was stay" – has forced a re-think about the horse’s suitability for Aintree, emboldened by the words of a highly-qualified National examiner.

Leighton Aspell knows what a National winner feels like, having ridden Pineau de Re and Many Clouds to success in 2014 and 2015. "He was the one who sort of persuaded me to have another crack at the National this year," said Williams, due to the post-race briefing after Aspell had teamed up with Buywise, for the first time, in the veterans’ chase at Sandown. "Leighton said to me: you’ve got to run him in the National and if you do I’ll ride him. And I thought bloody hell if he’s saying that then I’d better do it! That was one of the reasons we’re going back down this route."

Unfortunately, a neck injury for Aspell has ruled him out of Aintree, closing one door but opening another for stable jockey Adam Wedge, who has won on Buywise in the past, but the endorsement from an Aintree aficionado like Aspell has added fuel to the fire that Buywise himself stoked up.

And Aspell isn’t the only unsung National hero influencing this Aintree adventure, as let’s not overlook the fact that Evan Williams has a phenomenal record in the race, masterminding a sequence of five successive National placings from 2009 to 2013 by virtue of his pinpoint preparation of State of Play and Cappa Bleu, a remarkable feat of priming to get the former into fourth in 2011 on his first start for a full year.     

The team is right, the time is right, and now it’s up to Buywise. Because of his patterns, and because of his practices, Buywise has been a byword for frustration. "I understand why he’s frustrated people, and there have been times when he’s frustrated me, but he means everything to the yard as they’re so hard to find, horses like him, who’ve maintained the standards he has and given us the days he has."

Don’t tell Hywel Jones, but what else makes Buywise a rare breed is that he’s one of those horses who subliminally transfers from private to public ownership, as everybody who knows racing knows Buywise and knows what’s coming, blurring the line between character and caricature, all because there’s a sense of personality about him, more so than most racehorses in the nation and any racehorse in the National.

A mix of talent and charisma

If the Grand National was decided by a public vote, like The X-Factor, then Buywise would win it, for mixing talent with charisma over the years in a method that he’s defined and a mode that defines him. The National is a race, not a game, but Sandown in January was a game-changer for Buywise, when he looked game for a change.

"I’m a big supporter of the National," said Williams, "and since Sandown I’ve thought to myself: what the hell am I worrying about? If the horse is fit and healthy – which he is - and he’s moving better and looking more of a stayer, then why don’t we give it another go this year."

There’s that word healthy again. There’s a feeling that Buywise has never been happier, because he’s never been healthier. The Grand National tests jumping and tests stamina, but above all it tests character, and the characterful Buywise is now – and perhaps only now – ready and able to speak freely, his mind freed by a new-found freedom of movement. A healthy mind in a healthy body. Mens Sana in Corpore Sano.