Sam Waley-Cohen: 'I think you have to be insane to be a professional jockey!'

Some things are meant to be. Recognition of this often arrives with hindsight, when we reflect that we really should have foreseen what was about to unfold. In Sam Waley-Cohen’s case it should have prompted us to back a 50-1 winner of the Grand National.

Noble Yeats may have ambushed better-fancied rivals at Aintree but the identity of the winning jockey was no surprise. Waley-Cohen’s record over the famous birch was second to none, and the race’s propensity to deliver implausible storylines should have steered us towards the gifted amateur who had already announced he would ride off into the sunset thereafter.

Waley-Cohen still exudes incredulity over his triumph when we meet in London two weeks later. Originally, the pre-National plan had been to hook up straight after Aintree for a canter down memory lane. But that reckoned without Waley-Cohen’s penchant for defying the odds.