ALL THAT'S MISSING IS STUART MACONIE

If it's the start of the year it must be time for the Racing Post to run another "100 Greatest..." poll, and this time around it is greatest rides the paper has been asking its readership to nominate.

These polls are never entirely satisfactory, with the races most recent in the memory or most frequently repeated on the specialist TV channels always likely to enjoy more elevated positions in the final countdown than some of them might ordinarily (however much assurances to the contrary may be made). To that end, then, it's heartening to see that Fred Winter's scarcely credible feat of not only staying, but winning on board Mandarin in the 1962 Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris having jumping the last 21 of the 25 fences with his bridle in bits, has made the final shortlist of 1o. And this despite - unless anyone knows different - the race not having been shown on UK terrestrial or digital for decades, if ever, and only (admittedly a big "only") Lord John Oaksey's evocative report of the achievement to go on in print.

Everybody will have their favourites among the 100 races to have made the cut and I have mine, too, including the race that just made the cut in position number 100, John Goulding's pillar-to-post victory aboard humble novices' hunters' chase winner Astral Charmer in the 1981 Scottish Grand National. I would have been about six and a half years old at the time and it was certainly the first horse race I ever saw that left an indelible mark in the memory. Big-priced horses don't go running off like that in front and stay there, I thought, especially when they really want to go back in their boxes instead (Astral Charmer tried to run out with a circuit ago but Goulding gathered him in most adeptly). Well, young Master Grayson, one of them did that day.

I'm not sure Astral Charmer is solely responsible for my enduring love of the marathon chase, the marathon chaser, the "little guy" winning, or some, all, or none of the above. Even now, though, I can still picture this unprepossessing animal popping Ayr's big, wide fences in splendid isolation whilst a big field lumbered and ultimately floundered behind him.

Another marathon chase performance I am pleased to see in the list is at number 61, and if Astral Charmer could be regarded as a little bit of a thinker judged on that mid-race antic at Ayr, then Rith Dubh has to go down as Albert Einstein. One of the most intelligent, and consequently least generous animals ever to grace a racecourse, he nevertheless found himself in the winner's circle at the 2002 Cheltenham Festival; almost certainly not by his design, though.

A gelding who routinely stopped as soon as struck with the whip, he was given the last word in quiet rides in that year's National Hunt Chase by the tremendous amateur John Thomas McNamara, dropped right out the back for the greater part of the race before being asked nicely, over and over again, to put his best foot forward until produced on the line in to win by a head.

To complete the marathon triumvirate, I am delighted to see that the assorted tribulations, travails and controversies surrounding Richard Guest in recent months have not entirely served to dissuade people from remembering just what an immaculate piece of horsemanship his getting Red Marauder home to win the 2001 Grand National in borderline unraceable conditions actually was. This, lest we not forget, was a horse far better at 2m4f than beyond it, who had bags of ability but at the same time the robustness of a piece of China, an oxygen deficiency and - most insurmountably of all, one would have thought - all the jumping prowess of a fridge freezer.

No horse will ever take so many of the big green fences at Aintree so awkwardly and win a major prize there, let alone do so leaping out of such desperate going; and the fact that Red Marauder did owed so very much to the degree to which Guest knew the gelding's every foible in his then role as trainer-in-all-but-name at Norman Mason's Brancepeth base. The What's A Filly incident will have hit Guest far harder than any of the withdrawals of owners' strings or sponsors from his yard in the last 15 months or so, as it has inevitably called into question the treatment of troubled animals in his care - arguably the thing which he has always held the most sacrosanct and never more in evidence than during Red Marauder's finest hour.