Kim Bailey

The trainer of the 2016 runner-up talks to Martha Terry about returning to Aintree, his hatred of coming second and his training resurgence.

- Martha Terry

KIM BAILEY hates coming second. Last April, he trained the Rooneys’ The Last Samuri to finish a commendable second in the Grand National— and described it as a “smack in the face”. “At the second-last I believed we’d won,” he says, as we sit in his spacious Cotswold stone office. “It’s like someone’s said you’ve won the Lottery and then they say they got the last number wrong.

“There is only one place to finish at Aintree — otherwise you might as well have pulled up. It was incredibly hard to take.

“Then you get shoved in front of the camera with Clare Balding asking questions, and all you want to do is have the largest drink you can find and burst into tears. But actually you don’t, you fight on.”

FIGHTING on is something Kim is extraordinarily good at. In the 1990s, he was riding the sort of wave Colin Tizzard’s surfing now. He won the National with Mr Frisk, the Gold Cup with Master Oats and the Champion Hurdle with Alderbrook — Paul Nicholls is the only other current trainer with that treble. But a move from Lambourn to Northamptonshire proved disastrous, and he plunged to a nadir of just three winners one season. Did he ever want to give up?

“I love every single moment of it,” laughs Kim who, aged 63, doesn’t have a single grey hair. “When things were going wrong, everyone told me to pack it in, but that made me more determined. Perhaps a low point makes you appreciate the good times more, but this is who I am, it’s my purpose. If you ever lose that reason to get out of bed, your reason for living is gone. I love getting up at the crack of dawn to work, and I get bored on Sundays.”