Celebrating Tiger Roll, the little horse with the biggest heart who became a national treasure
Don’t be fooled by this “little rat of a thing” and his diminutive stature, says Kate Johnson of the dual Grand National winner Tiger Roll, for this larger-than-life character – who was bred for the Flat – never once fell and knew how to work a crowd
Tiger Roll was a box-office sort of horse. Fittingly, the 2022 Cheltenham Festival delivered more drama than the Oscars.
Rachael Blackmore was “absolutely lost for words” when she became the first woman to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup with a note-perfect ride on A Plus Tard and was greeted with rapturous applause. Jack Kennedy rode a fearsome race on Delta Work to win the Glenfarclas Cross Country Chase on an almost waterlogged course and was met with thunderous boos.
The reason? He’d relegated beloved Tiger Roll and Davy Russell into second place and denied what would have been, in Irish trainer Gordon Elliott’s words, “the perfect ending”.
The owners, the O’Learys’ Gigginstown House Stud, had already announced Tiger would retire and live with Michael and his family as his “fifth child” after this race.
Davy was surprised by the crowd’s reaction and says, “I’ve never heard it before. I can understand where people were coming from, but it seemed to be in jest, it didn’t feel like there was any malice in it.”
The emotion Tiger inspires is no surprise to Jerry O’Brien, the retired Coolmore vet who bred the now 16-year-old diminutive bay with the outsized whiter-than-white star and pony-ish thick forelock as a Flat horse.
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He recalls with great tenderness his first sight of the foal: “He had an air of invincibility, a beautiful head, an air of whatever it is – confidence – he had that look, you see it in people too, whatever it is.”
All this and “a beautiful mover, a daisy cutter. He’d do anything for you, very placid, though if you took him on or tried to bully him, you wouldn’t win.”
Tiger – or Sausage – Roll
Tiger Roll’s career started unpromisingly at Godolphin in Newmarket where Jerry notes with no delight he was nicknamed “Sausage Roll” and says,“I think they didn’t understand him, he needed one-to-one treatment.”
Having bought Tiger at Tattersalls, Godolphin sold him, unraced, to National Hunt trainer Nigel Hawke. When he refused to go down to the gallops, instead of arguing with him, they showed him a fence and “he cleared it, and the rest is history”.
“They never taught him how to jump, he trained himself,” Jerry says with obvious pride.
His first race was over hurdles, rather than the traditional bumper Flat race, and he won. Nigel said at the time, “this horse can do anything”.
He changed hands and by the time he trounced his competition at the 2014 Cheltenham Festival Triumph Hurdle, he was owned by the O’Learys and trained by Gordon Elliott, who says of the race that put Tiger on the map: “He always showed a brilliant attitude. When he won, if he’d done nothing from then, we wouldn’t have been disappointed, but he never stopped pleasing us.”
The race wasn’t the rocket launch pad one might expect, though, and Tiger’s light wasn’t always burning bright. Plenty of people thought he’d lost his way.
At the next Festival, he only made 13th place in the World Hurdle, and his next win at the Festival wasn’t until the 2017 novices’ chase. In 2018, he took the Cross Country Chase, again in 2019 by 22 lengths, and by 18 lengths in 2021.
He’d found his race, though there were plenty of disappointing runs between these victories, including being pulled up in the 2020 Cross Country Chase and the Grade One chase at Aintree in 2021 when he finished 92 lengths behind the winner. Gordon never gave up on the horse he describes as “a bit of a character”.
“He was very straightforward, he liked getting on with things and getting his own way,” so Tiger went hunting, cross-country and to the beach, all to spark his interest.
The 2018 Grand National was one more attempt to relight the fire.
Davy Russell recalls: “I felt I was going to be finished very early, I didn’t think he had any chance,” explaining that Tiger’s an “economical jumper”.
“I’d have thought before I rode that he wouldn’t get round in an old National, but guaranteed he’d have won the Grand National no matter what the fences are. He’s just so shocking clever and wicked quick with his fences. I thought it would catch him out, but he knew what he was doing.”
Davy remembers landing over Becher’s Brook: “Tiger sidestepped a horse on the ground and came back to where he was. He was looking after me as much as anything else,” he says.
“The experience was unreal, heart in your mouth at times, he gets so low at his fences, you don’t know if he’ll lift his legs high enough. He has it to a fine art.”
Praise indeed from such an experienced and successful jockey, who gave Tiger a race that Jerry O’Brien describes as “poetry in motion”. He remembers Davy losing an iron between fences and “without losing any momentum or balance he gently got his foot back in. That’s horsemanship at its best.”
How the Tiger ticks
Davy had found the key to Tiger. On the surface, it’s simply that “Tiger just loves jumping” but the jockey also understands the horse.
“He’s not that keen on being told what to do, you have to ask him to do it,” he explains. “He’ll give you everything, empty the tank, whatever he has he’ll give, as long as you don’t ask for too much too soon.”
It’s the same trait that Jerry first noticed in his foal.
Come the 2019 Grand National, the 4/1 favourite was so wound up, Davy needed a lead from another jockey to the start. This time, he recalls: “I felt he kept a little bit to himself the first year, he was a little bit idle which gave him the opportunity to come back and have another go.”
Together they pulled off a feat not seen since Red Rum in 1974. Gordon says: “Any horse can do it once, but to come back and do it the following year, carrying a lot more weight was very special.”
He was ruled out of the Grand National in 2022 and his – depending on whom you ask – much-fancied chance to equal Red Rum’s record of three wins, when his owner Micheal O’Leary vociferously disagreed with the handicappers’ assessment and withdrew him.
As Tiger’s career was winding down after five Cheltenham wins and two Grand Nationals, Mary Nugent, who looked after the star, says the staff drew lots before his races, “to give everyone a chance to lead him up”.
“You could work in racing for years and very rarely come across one like him,” she says. “To have any involvement at all is amazing.”
None of which would come as news to Tiger.
Gordon says: “He knows he’s the man, he’s a bit of a show-off.”
And Mary agrees: “He knows how good he is. He’s a really strong character, he knows his own name and when you call him, he comes to his door and expects treats all the time.”
When Gordon’s friends brought their children to the yard, staff would put them up for a spin.
“He’s as good as gold, then a jockey gets on and he tries to buck them off,” says Mary with obvious affection. “He is what he is, there’s not a bad bone in his body, he’s just a monkey.”
From underdog to national treasure
Why did the public take to him so strongly?
“I think it’s because he’s the underdog – having won at the Festival, he disappeared for a couple of years,” says Davy.
“He was small and unwanted at the start, though he was always well looked after, but he was bred for a different job than he ended up doing. And then to win not once but twice…
“People around the world have an interest in the Grand National, those associated with it end up being household names and for him to continue winning after, which is not the norm, adds to his reputation.”
Gordon agrees: “He’s not the biggest, but he’s got a big heart. It’s his style of racing, he never knows when he’s beaten, a few have said he’s gone and he keeps coming back.”
Surprisingly, when Gordon considers what this horse has done for the yard, it’s not the prestigious wins he cites, but something more intimate and emotional.
“The morale he brings around the place is unbelievable,” he says. “Everyone who comes into the yard – the postman, DHL, someone to see another horse – the first question is, ‘Where’s Tiger Roll?’
“He’s bigger than the yard, bigger than horse racing, all they want to see is Tiger, he stands out on his own.”
Michael O’Leary ungallantly once described Tiger as, “a little rat of a thing, not a good horse, not a class horse, just a complete overachiever”, which Jerry says merely had the effect of “putting everyone on Tiger’s side”.
And for the record, he’s not that small. He’s had more inches added to and subtracted from his height than Tom Cruise over the years, but he was measured at the yard for this article and… he’s 16hh. Or is he? Jerry maintains that he leant into him (he visited Tiger after his second Grand National win) and he’d put him at 15.3hh but “perhaps he was wearing shoes?”.
It’s clear that the only thing that all connections can agree on, is that Tiger Roll is without a doubt the horse of a lifetime.
Facts and figures
- Tiger Roll was sired by the 2007 Derby winner Authorized and bred as a Flat horse
- He was bought at Tattersalls by Godolphin, who later sold him, unraced to National Hunt Nigel Hawke for £10,000, where he won his debut as a three-year-old over hurdles before being sold for £80,000 to the Gigginstown House Stud and celebrating his fourth birthday by winning the Triumph Hurdle at Cheltenham on 14 March 2014
- 45 races
- Nine-year career
- 13 wins
- £1.4million prize-money
- Never once fell
- One of only three horses to win five times at the Cheltenham Festival
Alice Plunkett: ‘Not one person didn’t want him to win’
ITV Racing presenter Alice Plunkett recalls Tiger’s last race at the Cheltenham Festival on 16 March 2022, when he finished second in heavy going to his stablemate Delta Work.
“I went into the pre-parade ring to see him and everyone was appreciating the moment, knowing it was the last time we’d see him on a racecourse,” says Alice.
“I followed him to the parade ring, he was getting a round of applause everywhere he went. It was very emotional, to be there walking along next to him, eight years after the Triumph Hurdle, realising how small he is, how big a personality he has, how much the public loved him.
“When the commentators said, ‘Tiger’s taking the lead,’ the place went mad, everyone was screaming ‘Come on Tiger!’ Not one person didn’t want him to win.
“He got a reception like I’d hardly seen. We averaged 1.2 million viewers for Cheltenham and it peaked at 1.6 million for Tiger Roll.”
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Born in Australia and bought up in the Midlands, Kate has ridden since childhood. After completing her degree and living abroad for several years, she became an award-winning BBC radio producer and Channel 4 documentary producer after which she became a freelance journalist, contributing to the Daily Mail, The Times, The Telegraph and others. She also collaborated with top jumps trainer Nicky Henderson OBE, to write his best-selling memoir, Nicky Henderson: My Life in 12 Horses. She owns currently cares for retrained National Hunt racehorse, Stop the Show.