Who are the only current trainers to have won the Grand National more than once?

The record for training the most Grand National winners is held, jointly, by George Dockeray, Fred Rimell and Donald ‘Ginger’ McCain, who all saddled four winners apiece. Of course, all three of them are deceased and, of current, active trainers, just two have saddled more than one Grand National winner.

The first of them was Nigel Twiston-Davies who, in 1998, saddled the Welsh Grand National winner Earth Summit to victory at Aintree and, four years later, repeated the feat with Bindaree. Indeed, his second victory in the Grand National renewed his zest for National Hunt racing at a time when he was winding down his training career. After a poor season, in which he would eventually saddle just 35 winners – his lowest seasonal total for a decade – Twiston-Davies was adamant he was retiring. Even the day after Bindaree won the National, he said, ‘I never ever wanted to be a trainer. That happened by accident. So I wouldn’t be giving up a career I always wanted to do.’ However, by his own admission, ‘…Bindaree changed everything.’

The second current trainer who has won the Grand National more than once is Gordon Elliott, who has recently returned from a six-month ban for bringing the sport of horse racing into disrepute. Elliott’s faux pas has been well chronicled elsewhere, but he became the youngest ever trainer of a National winner when saddling Silver Birch to victory in 2007 and added wins two and three with back-to-back victories for Tiger Roll in 2018 and 2019.