Grand National 2025 runners and riders: Full horse list
When Corbiere won the 1983 Grand National, the 23-year-old Bryan Burrough, fresh out of university but already embarked on a career in the City, became the youngest winning owner in the history of the world’s greatest race.
Now, 42 years later as a ‘pensioner’, he is back for another bite of the cherry with Beauport, a horse bought to be a two-miler, and he is asking himself whether, as a small owner with never more than legs in a couple of horses and one outright, he will feel guilty if lightning were to strike twice.
It is the big owners, he reasons, like Gigginstown and JP McManus, who put millions into the sport, who deserve to win it multiple times.
On balance, however, he decides that any such feeling would be offset by the enjoyment derived from the overwhelming emotion of winning the world’s greatest race which would be experienced by his wife, Philippa, who was not on the scene for Corbiere but who is daily reminded of his achievements by photographs and the trophy of the Jenny Pitman-trained white-faced chestnut, jockey Sam Twiston-Davies and Fay Shilton, the horse’s groom.
There are several parallels between Beauport – pronounced the French way with a silent T – and Corbiere.
Both horses were bought as untried, unnamed store horses. Corbiere was named after a rocky point on Jersey where Burrough still has a family connection; Beauport is named after the neighbouring bay which was once given as a wedding present to his great grandmother.
Beauport is the first horse he has named after somewhere on the island since Corbiere. Beauport, his favourite beach, was always a back-up name for any horse which they could not suitably name in the traditional way; taking something from the sire and dam. But ‘by Califet out of Byerley Beauty’ had stumped them.
Both horses won ‘Nationals’ on their way to Aintree; Corbiere the Welsh, Beauport the Midlands.
“Corbiere was bought as a two-year-old,” remembers Burrough who is now a director at Newbury, a racecourse on the up again after a long spell in the doldrums. “A cousin offered my father a share in the horse. He said he had no interest at all but my mother said: ‘Hang on, it’s Bryan’s passion, why not get it for him?’ He paid the training fees but he ran in my name.”
Though Burrough had been at Radley College with Kim Bailey, Oliver and Simon Sherwood and Nigel Twiston-Davies, it was his maths teacher who had got him into racing. “He was deeply into mental arithmetic,” recalls Burrough. “Every Saturday he’d set a test with questions like: ‘How many furlongs are there in the St Leger?’ And betting fractions. Initially, I ran a book for about two days – until I was cleaned out by the insiders – but I went on to be head of the racing society at Radley.”
Corbiere ran in one of the first bumpers ever run in Britain in March ...
