Rachael Blackmore will return to Aintree on Thursday not as a history-maker in waiting, but as part of the race’s furniture — immortalised as a Grand National Legend.
Three years after she drove Minella Times through the roar and the rain to win the 2021 National, the 36-year-old joins the most exclusive club in jump racing. Her name will now sit alongside Ginger McCain and Jenny Pitman, JP McManus, Red Rum, Tiger Roll and Aldaniti. The giants of this race. The ones who changed it.
For Blackmore, that moment in 2021 did exactly that. It altered the story of the Grand National and, with it, the landscape of her sport. No woman had ever won the world’s most famous steeplechase before she swept around these famous turns, measured every fence and held her nerve up that lung-bursting run-in. When she crossed the line, it was more than a victory; it was a fault line in racing history.
Aintree will acknowledge that on the opening day of the Randox Grand National Festival, when a plaque in her honour is unveiled as part of a special ceremony. It will stand among those commemorating the trainers, owners and horses who have defined this race over decades. The permanent reminder that the jockey from County Tipperary belongs in that conversation.
“Winning the Randox Grand National at Aintree on Minella Times is a moment in my life I will never forget,” Blackmore has said of that day. Seeing her name etched into the roll of Grand National Legends, she added, is “such an honour” and something that leaves her feeling “very lucky to be part of that history.”
The celebrations will not end at the wall of legends. Aintree has gone a step further, placing Blackmore’s name at the heart of the racecourse itself. The newly-renamed Blackmore’s Bar will be officially opened by the jockey on Thursday, a sentence she admits she never expected to say.
“It’s a cool idea and something a bit different that people can hopefully enjoy during the week,” she said.
Blackmore’s Bar will operate as an alcohol-free space, a modern twist on the traditional racecourse watering hole. Racegoers will find Lavazza coffee, fresh bakes, snacks and a range of alcohol-free drinks, aimed at those who want the buzz of the festival without the booze. To mark the opening, the first 100 coffees served on Thursday will be complimentary, a small gesture to pull people through the doors and into a new kind of race-day hub.
For The Jockey Club, the honour and the bar go hand in hand — a recognition of past achievement and a nod to how the sport wants to present itself now.
“Rachael’s outstanding achievement in the Randox Grand National speaks for itself and it seems only right that she has been made a Grand National Legend at the earliest opportunity,” said Dickon White, The Jockey Club’s north west regional director. He also underlined the thinking behind the new space, pointing to feedback from racegoers calling for a different kind of environment on course.
So on Thursday, as the festival opens and the noise begins to build towards another National, Aintree will pause for a moment. The plaques will be unveiled. The coffee machines in Blackmore’s Bar will hiss into life. And the rider who shattered one of sport’s most stubborn barriers will walk back into the place where it all changed, this time not to chase history, but to take her seat among its legends.
