Tiger Roll: from Flat reject to over-achiever

What do you get if cross Sadler’s Wells with…Sadler’s Wells? It might sound like the start of a bad joke, but inbreeding to Coolmore’s legendary stallion has resulted in some serious racehorses. Dual Arc winner Enable, for instance, features Sadler’s Wells twice close up in her pedigree, and, more surprisingly perhaps, so too does Tiger Roll who is a short price to win his second Grand National.

Tiger Roll’s breeder, Gerry O’Brien, worked as a member of the veterinary team at Coolmore for the best part of thirty years, a time when Sadler’s Wells emerged as the stud’s outstanding stallion. ‘I thought you can’t have enough Sadler’s Wells in a pedigree’, reasoned O’Brien when explaining the thinking behind the mating which resulted in Tiger Roll. The chances of Tiger Roll becoming a champion on the Flat like Enable might have been tiny, but in his early years that was still a much more conceivable destiny for him than becoming a four-time Cheltenham Festival winner - or a Grand National hero.

Derby winners – Epsom Derby winners at any rate - don’t sire Grand National winners. Before Tiger Roll, a son of the 2007 Epsom winner Authorized (by Sadler’s Wells’ son Montjeu), won at Aintree last year, the last Grand National winner with a Derby-winning sire had been Voluptuary in 1884. Like Tiger Roll, Voluptuary was evidently something of a one-off, having contested the Derby himself three years earlier, while he won the Grand National on his very first start over fences! Authorized’s best Flat performer to date is Hartnell, who won the Queen’s Vase at Royal Ascot when trained by Mark Johnston, and has since gone on to greater success in Australia where he’s a Group 1 winner. He has also chased home Winx in one of her Cox Plates and finished third in a Melbourne Cup. But Tiger Roll isn’t the only high-class jumper sired by Authorized. When Tiger Roll won the National Hunt Chase at the 2017 Cheltenham Festival, he was one of two winners at the meeting that year for his sire who was also responsible for the Stayers’ Hurdle winner Nichols Canyon.

Whilst speed and precocity aren’t in his genes, Tiger Roll was very much bred for a Flat career rather than a jumping one, and when he was bought by Sheikh Mohammed’s then bloodstock adviser John Ferguson for 70,000 guineas as a foal at Newmarket, a career in the Godolphin empire looked the most likely scenario. After all, Tiger Roll’s half-brother Ahzeemah became a very smart stayer for Saeed bin Suroor, winning the Lonsdale Cup at York and finishing second in the Irish St Leger and Goodwood Cup. Another of Tiger Roll’s half-brothers to do well on the Flat is Austrian School who was a typically progressive staying three-year-old handicapper for Mark Johnston last season and is perhaps destined for still better things this year.

According to the sales catalogue, Tiger Roll’s grandam On Air ‘won 3 races at home and in France’, but that’s doing her a disservice as she actually won four times. She did win three races on the Flat, the first of those in France where her career began, but her final success – arguably her most important now that she’s the grandam of a Grand National winner, and presumably the one that’s been overlooked – came over jumps in a novice hurdle at Haydock when she was ridden by Grand National-winning jockey Mick Fitzgerald.

#GrandNational memories... Nick Gaselee recalls Party Politics' topical but unexpected win 25 years ago > https://t.co/ap5Q9NSdOW pic.twitter.com/OcpoFhb9QV

— ITV Racing (@itvracing) 7 April 2017

In fact, for a horse with a mainly Flat background, it’s peculiar how names connected with success in the Grand National are a recurring theme in Tiger Roll’s story. On Air was a rare Flat winner for her trainer Nick Gaselee, best known for training perhaps the biggest horse ever to win the Grand National a couple of years earlier, Party Politics. At eighteen hands, Party Politics would have towered over Tiger Roll, but the latter’s small stature has rather been overstated. Timeform described Tiger Roll as ‘leggy and lengthy’ as a juvenile hurdler with ‘plenty of size about him and he should continue to improve physically as he fills into his frame.’ Tiger Roll might not actually have grown very much since his four-year-old days, but owner Michael O’Leary’s description of Tiger Roll as ‘a little rat of a thing’ is no doubt based on comparisons with the rest of his Gigginstown Stud string, the vast majority of whom are purpose-bred chasers with physiques to match.

Returning to Tiger Roll’s pedigree, we find another name synonymous with the Grand National associated with his dam Swiss Roll, a daughter of the Sadler’s Wells stallion Entrepreneur who won the 2000 Guineas. Swiss Roll was trained by Tommy Stack who achieved fame as a jockey when partnering Red Rum to his historic third Grand National victory for Ginger McCain in 1977. Swiss Roll won a couple of races, as well as finishing second in the listed Vintage Crop Stakes at Navan, and was one of four winners – all trained by Stack – out of On Air. Swiss Roll’s brother Berenson ran only twice as a two-year-old but finished second to Dubawi in the National Stakes at the Curragh on his final start.  

Here is Swiss Roll, dam (mammy) of the most popular horse in jump racing Tiger Roll+who is due to foal a Teofilo next month, with The Tiger's breeder, Jerry O'Brien. Her wee un has to carry 4lbs more now with Bristol De Mai out but might become bankable as a result #GrandNational pic.twitter.com/WJ9lm5DoCW

— Daragh Ó Conchúir (@RebelDevil71) 27 March 2019

Another of On Air’s winners, Khachaturian, after winning for Stack on the Flat, became a useful jumper for Ginger McCain’s son Donald, though was ungenuine with it, and earned ‘the dreaded Timeform squiggle.’ Tiger Roll acquired the same warning symbol after appearing to have lost his enthusiasm, and had the dubious distinction of being the only Grand National winner to have had a squiggle alongside his rating going into the race. Needless to say, it was removed after his Aintree heroics last year, and his attitude of late has been hard to fault. There’s further evidence of some temperament in the family, however, as Tiger Roll’s breeder described Swiss Roll as ‘a nightmare’ who `worried a lot and ate very little.’

As it turned out, Tiger Roll never made it into training for his original owners, and when he was sold by Darley as an unraced three-year-old at Doncaster, for just £10,000, it proved the turning point which set him on course for a career over jumps instead. It was another Grand National actor who played a part because his purchaser was Devon trainer Nigel Hawke, winner of the 1991 race in his riding days aboard Seagram.

"There was nobody cheering louder than me" Nigel Hawke delighted to see former inmate Tiger Roll become Grand National hero.https://t.co/nA3Y6mi5UI pic.twitter.com/A0NysUry9u

— Racing TV (@RacingTV) 18 April 2018

`I remember after we bought him there was talk of running him in a three-year-old bumper, but he was such a natural from the day we started schooling him that we said we'd go straight over hurdles’ recalled Hawke after Tiger Roll won at Aintree last year. Tiger Roll duly made a winning debut in a juvenile hurdle at Market Rasen months later, though that proved to be his only start for Hawke as he soon changed hands again, this time for £80,000, at Cheltenham, and on just his second outing for Gordon Elliott in the Gigginstown colours he won the Triumph Hurdle, the first of his now four successes at the Festival.

‘It was a year when they didn’t have a three-year-old hurdler/Triumph Hurdle horse and that’s why he fell into the basket’ explained agent Mags O’Toole, who makes many of the purchases for Michael and Eddie O’Leary’s operation, making his acquisition sound almost accidental. It was Eddie O’Leary, Gigginstown’s racing manager, who described Tiger Roll, having far exceeded the ambitions for which he was originally bought, as ‘a complete over-achiever’.

That’s something Tiger Roll has in common with the horse who boasts the greatest Grand National record of all. He too was Flat bred, but with a much speedier pedigree than Tiger Roll’s, and was bought with a much more modest aim. Red Rum accomplished that task when winning an early-season two-year-old seller at the 1967 Grand National meeting – a mixed meeting in those days - before going on to achieve that record third National victory ten years later. Plenty of National winners since Red Rum have tried and failed to win the race for a second time, but Tiger Roll has defied convention enough times already to rule out his chances of adding another National to his remarkable haul of races.