Dan McDonald

sort of peak horses here who, when they're travelling at speed, you know, popping over these handy hurdles that are sort of, they're not really proper fences anymore, things will happen at speed.

And I feel like there will be, there will still be fatalities in the Grand National.

It just might be a different type

of fatality but you're at the stage now where when every time there is one you have to make another amendment meanwhile you know i'm not trying to draw like draw attention to stuff that happens elsewhere but like your fairy house at the weekend the third last fence at fairy house i mean on successive days two well-known horses were killed at that fence you know there wasn't a big massive like there's gonna be no talk shows this weekend bringing people on to speak about it

I mentioned to you upstairs, you were surprised to hear it, but the Galway Festival every year is horrendous.

I think it was the last year or the year before there was 10 horses killed at the Galway Festival.

there's never a sense of we need to change defences, we need to change the track or whatever.

It sort of goes away.

Racing probably has the confidence to... And I don't know, I'm conscious of what I'm arguing in favour of here because there will be some people listening to this and I understand that would say, well, there should be no horses being killed in any situation at all.

My point is that the Grand National has just become this massive overreaction to things that happen in the race.

And as a result now, the traditionalists...

don't particularly enjoy the race in the way that they used to and the people who you've modified it for don't care about the race anyway really so you know but we'll be probably sat down on Saturday afternoon probably waiting to see what happens afterwards and ITV then are sort of caught like the middle of the race is over Ed Chamberlain will be like trying to

And after the Goal Cup, it was like, all the horses are home safe and sound.

And then Envoy Allen unfortunately collapsed on the way back up the walkway.

They just backed themselves into a corner here where eventually the Grand National could just end up being over two miles with no fences, but then someone could fall and they'll probably change that to a mile.

So I don't know what it's really...

Like the changes they made after 2012 were necessary and they made it a better race.

Unfortunately, things happened after that will happen and they don't have the confidence to just own them and go, well, this is the sport.

Now they're just like, yeah.

and as a result by the way because the race is so easy now in terms of being a test there's better horses running like Willie Mullins is running battalions in it it's actually harder for maybe some of the the smaller fairy tale stories to get into the race now okay so anyway that's really interesting yeah um