LIVERPOOL, England — It was a great day for the Mullins family in the Grand National.
Ridden by amateur jockey Patrick Mullins and trained by his father Willie Mullins, Nick Rockett — a 33-1 shot — won the horse race in front of about 70,000 racegoers at Aintree Racecourse on Saturday.
For Willie Mullins, it was a 1-2-3 in the grueling steeplechase. I Am Maximus (7-1), which was bidding to win in back-to-back years, finished 2 1/2 lengths back in second place and Grangeclare West (33-1) was third, with both horses also trained by Mullins.
“It is lovely to be able to give your son a ride in the National,” said Willie Mullins, who was so emotional after the race he could barely talk. “But to be able to win it is just unbelievable.”
Patrick Mullins said winning the storied race was “everything I’ve dreamed about since I was a kid.”
“It’s a cliche,” he said, “but when I was five or six years old, I remember reading books about the National and watching black-and-white videos of (three-time winner) Red Rum. So to put my name there is incredibly special.”
The Mullins family has quite the history with the Grand National. One of Patrick’s cousins, David, rode Rule The World to victory as a 19-year-old in 2016, while another cousin — Emmet — was the trainer of 2022 winner Noble Yeats.
Willie Mullins even had the fifth-place finisher in Saturday’s race, Meetingofthewaters.
The owner of Nick Rockett is Stewart Andrew, whose wife, Sadie, originally owned the horse and died of cancer in December 2022 — soon after Nick Rockett ran his first jumps race.
“She’s here, she’s here,” said Andrew, who carried Patrick Mullins on his shoulders at one point after the race.
The Grand National — a race for 34 horses over 30 fences — has long been regarded as one of the most dangerous horse races in the world because of the size of the fences, though a number of new measures were introduced last year in an attempt to make it safer.
The 177th edition appeared to pass off without major incident.
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