What Does It Take to Win the Grand National? Twenty Years of Winners Decoded

Every year, millions of people pick a name from a list of 34 horses and hope for the best. Most of them are going on gut instinct, a name they like, a colour of silks, or a tip from someone at work who sounds like they know what they are talking about.

There is nothing wrong with that. It is the Grand National, and part of its appeal is that nobody truly knows what is going to happen.

But if you want to go into race day with something more than a hunch, the last twenty years of results tell a story. Not a neat, predictable story with a formula you can follow to the letter, but a pattern of the kind of horse that tends to get involved when the race is being decided.

Here is what the form book actually says.

Age: The Race Has Got Younger

The old wisdom was that the Grand National suited a mature, experienced horse. A ten or eleven year old who had been around the track a few times. That wisdom is increasingly out of date. Looking at the last twenty renewals, seven of the winners were eight years old, six were nine, four were ten, three were eleven, and one, Noble Yeats in 2022, was a seven year old, the first of his age to win since 1940.

The shift is not subtle. In the last ten runnings, eight of the ten winners were aged eight or nine. The race has got younger, and the reason is fairly straightforward.

The fences have been modified to be more jumpable, the race has been shortened slightly, and the emphasis has moved towards horses who are good enough and athletic enough to jump efficiently, rather than old enough to know every trick in the book.

A progressive eight or nine year old who is still improving is now considerably more valuable than a twelve year old whose best days are behind him.

That said, eleven year olds have won three times in twenty years, so age alone is not a reason to cross a horse off the list. Horses of thirteen or older, though, have not won the race since 1923. Draw your own conclusions.

Weight: Where the Handicapper Draws the Line

The Grand National is a handicap race, which means the weights are set to theoretically give every horse an equal chance.

In practice, they do not. The top weights carry too much, the bottom weights carry too little, and somewhere in between lies the range that consistently produces winners.

Of the last twenty winners, the vast majority carried between 10st 3lb and 11st 6lb. Only three horses in nearly five decades have won carrying more than 11st 5lb, and those were exceptional cases.

The most recent were I Am Maximus in 2024 (11st 6lb) and Nick Rockett in 2025 (11st 8lb), both trained by Willie Mullins, who tends to operate at a level above the rest of the field regardless of what weight his horses carry.

For most trainers and most horses, the workable range sits between roughly 10st 5lb and 11st 2lb. Light enough to travel, heavy enough to indicate genuine ability.

Horses at the very bottom of the weights are often there because they lack the rating to warrant more. Horses near the top are carrying a burden that tells against them over four miles and thirty fences, where every extra pound compounds with every stride.

Starting Price: Favourites Rarely Win

Of the twenty winners since 2005, only four started as favourite or joint favourite: Hedgehunter (7/1 favourite, 2005), Comply or Die (7/1 joint favourite, 2008), Don't Push It (10/1 joint favourite, 2010), and Tiger Roll (4/1 favourite, 2019). That is four from twenty, or one in five. The other sixteen winners all started at double-figure odds or longer, including Mon Mome at 100/1, Aurora's Encore at 66/1, Noble Yeats at 50/1, and three separate winners at 33/1.

The concentration of winners sits between 8/1 and 33/1. That range has produced more than half of the last twenty winners, and it is where most serious form students focus their attention. It is not a coincidence. A horse at 8/1 to 20/1 is typically well fancied enough to have real ability without being so short that a single mistake ends its chance. The market, for all its imperfections, tends to get the broad range right even when it gets the specific winner wrong.

Prices above 33/1 produce winners often enough to justify a small each-way interest in the right horse at the right price, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

The Irish Takeover

If there is one trend in the last decade that stands above everything else, it is the dominance of Irish-trained horses. Six of the last seven renewals have gone to Ireland.

Tiger Roll won back-to-back for Gordon Elliott in 2018 and 2019. Minella Times carried Rachael Blackmore to history for Henry De Bromhead in 2021. Noble Yeats won at 50/1 for Emmet Mullins in 2022. Corach Rambler gave Lucinda Russell a second Scottish-trained winner in 2023, the exception that proves the rule. Then Willie Mullins took three of the last two years running with I Am Maximus and Nick Rockett.

This is not a fluke. Irish racing produces horses built for stamina, trained over testing ground, schooled in big-field handicap chases from a young age.

The conditions that produce a Grand National winner, staying power, jumping ability, an appetite for a long hard race, are the same conditions that Irish racing tests and rewards every winter. Whether that trend continues in 2026 is the question that sits underneath every other in the field.

Form Coming Into the Race

What should you actually see on a horse's form card if you want to take it seriously? The data points in one direction fairly clearly. Twenty-one of the last thirty-three winners finished in the top four last time out before the National. That does not mean a horse with a recent poor run cannot win, but it does mean that horses arriving in form are considerably more likely to deliver.

Equally important is the gap between the previous run and race day. Horses who ran between thirty and fifty-five days before the National tend to perform best, fresh enough to have recovered but not so long off the track that they lack a sharpener.

Horses who have had a hard race at the Cheltenham Festival four or five weeks earlier can sometimes carry the fatigue of that run into Aintree. Tiger Roll was the famous exception in 2019, winning the Cross Country at Cheltenham before the National, but exceptions are not rules.

The ideal final preparation run, if you are looking for one, tends to be a placed or winning effort in a Grade 2 or Grade 3 chase over three miles or more, six to eight weeks before the National. Not too demanding, not too long ago.

What All This Means for 2026

An eight or nine year old, carrying between 10st 5lb and 11st 2lb, trained in Ireland, arriving off a recent placed or winning run, starting somewhere between 8/1 and 25/1. That is the composite picture of a Grand National winner built from twenty years of results.

It is not a guarantee of anything, and the race will cheerfully produce a ten year old at 40/1 trained in Yorkshire the moment anyone claims to have it figured out.

But the trends are real. They exist because the race rewards a specific combination of stamina, jumping ability and athletic youth, and because the Irish training system has spent the last decade producing horses built precisely to that specification.

Going into April 11, those are the horses worth looking at first. Everything else is the race doing what the Grand National has always done best: keeping you guessing until the very last fence.