He took 25years to win Grand National shot

Winning Grand National shot.... He took 25 years to get this picture

I’ve been covering the Grand National for 25 years. I know it very well, and I’ve got a bit of a routine that I worked out to allow me to cover as much as I can of the race. The horses do two big laps, and I’ve worked out that I can capture the start, then go to the biggest fence in the course, called the Chair, before going to the finish.

The Chair is notorious for being big and you can get quite a few fallers. I normally put remote cameras down either side of the fence, they are positioned and set off by the camera I’m holding in my hands. I do this at quite a few sports events, to basically give me a different angle and more of a chance of getting a picture of something that happens incredibly quickly. Sometimes when there’s so many horses piling over a fence you can be on one side and something happens on the other side and you can get completely blocked by other horses.

I’ve been putting remote cameras at this fence for 25 years hoping for a decent picture, and there’s been some nice ones, but not any that I thought were really good. This year it rained very heavily, which meant the horses, by the time they came around after their first circuit to the chair fence, were quite tired. The Chair has a big dip in front of it and is over 5ft (1.5m) tall. Several horses fell at the fence, because they just couldn’t get over it properly, and it caused a bit of carnage. Then this one horse didn’t get over at all and careered into the fence, catapulting its jockey, Nina Carberry, over the fence. In that moment the picture was taken with a remote camera which was down low by one of the sides of the fences, about 20 yards from where I actually stood.

The picture [shows] two other horses in the mayhem of what happened just before Carberry came over, lying in the fence. The Grand National uses unique fences made out of fir and birch, and if a horse goes into it they disintegrate, so you see all this spruce lying all over the place.

Carberry was catapulted so quickly over the fence she ended up going into the back of a horse that had just jumped. On the right side of the photo there’s a tail; when I first saw the picture I thought ‘if only that tail wasn’t there’, but then I realised it actually makes it really nice – she’s going into the back of another horse, which is just weird, I’ve never seen that before. Because it was heavy ground the horses were going quite slowly.

At the time I knew something had gone on but I didn’t realise she had catapulted like that. As soon as all the horses have jumped that fence and go off on their second lap I pick up all my cameras and run to the finish, because I’ve just got enough time to get there and see the winning horse cross the line. I’m just concentrating and don’t have time to look at my camera to see the pictures I’ve already taken. Then there’s the celebrating and awarding of the trophy. It was only when I was walking back did I see the picture and think, ‘oh that’s quite nice’.

Tom Jenkins won first prize in the ‘sports – singles’ category at the 2017 World Press Photo awards