Flashback
Racing Post
31st March 1992

George Ennor Talks to Maurice Barnes about Rubstic's greatest moment

Three horses jumped the last with a chance of victory in the 1979 Grand National, but all were tired and on the run to the line it was the stout-hearted Rubstic (Maurice Barnes, left) who stayed on strongest to wear down Zongalero (Bob Davies) and make it a mighty triumph for a small yard.

Barnes had no special battle plan when he went out for his first National ride, though he did have one important instruction. That did not come from Rubstic's trainer John Leadbetter but from the jockey's father Tommy, who had almost ridden to National glory 17 years before when his mount Wyndburgh finished second to Kilmore and Fred Winter.

"Dad said I had to go one better than him", Barnes recalls from the family yard at Little Salkeld, near Penrith, where the training "is going a lot better than last year. We've had a couple of winners and nine placed and I'm quite pleased.

"The National was really, though, just another race and I went out with the plan to hunt round the first circuit. He made just one mistake, at the fence before Becher's first time round, but after that it was all fairly straightforward over the fences. It was pretty nip and tuck going to the last with four of us more or less in line, but it was there that I thought I might win"

The thought was farther to the achievement, too, for though Zongalero landed in front over that fence, with Rough And Tumble in with every chance, it was Rubstic who was to prove the strongest on the run to the line and he pulled clear to beat Zongalero by a length and a half to give Barnes a memory he revives every so often by watching the race on his video.

The winner's surefootedness was one of the great factors in his favour. He had never fallen before he went to Liverpool and Barnes is sure that he would not have done so the following year if he had not slipped going into the chair. Nor will he have it that Rubstic was not much more than a one-paced plodder. "I was looking at the Racing Post on the day that Cool Ground won at Haydock and saw that Rbstick still holds the course record there. Cool Ground's time was nothing like as fast".