Grand National 2012: Synchronised victory would be wonderous but Golden Miller wins true Aintree tale After the victory, the delighted owner Dorothy Paget gave trainer Basil Briscoe and jockey Gerry Wilson chocolate miniatures of the horse. And to Golden Miller himself, she gave a peck on the nose. It was, the joke went, the only time the man-hating Miss Paget, millionaire daughter of an English lord and an American heiress, ever kissed someone of the opposite sex. Mind, Golden Miller was a gelding, came the inevitable punchline. Paget was amazing, a tyrannical, shy and increasingly oddball individual. A plain, hefty woman who hated the limelight, she was the biggest owner and gambler in a male-dominated world, one to make Synchronised's owner J.P McManus seem a veritable lightweight today. Paget would sleep all day at her Hermit's Wood mansion in Buckinghamshire, then chain smoke and eat like a horse while conducting business from her bed at night, phoning her bookmaker with monumental bets - extraordinarily, including "honour" wagers on races which she hadn't seen but which had already been run - before ringing exasperated trainers with their instructions, or just a rollocking, in the dead of night. When Briscoe eventually pulled out his telephone in despair, he received a scolding 2.30am visit from one of Paget's all-female staff. "Training horses is child's play," he once sighed. But it's a hell of a bloody job trying to train Miss Paget. What they had in common was an adoration of Golden Miller, the gelding bred from a five guinea stallion in County Meath who initially so underwhelmed Briscoe on the racecourse that he sent it hunting instead, only to find it couldn't even keep up with the hounds. As his results improved, the horse's dying owner Phillip Carr instructed Briscoe to find a new buyer. At a Chemin de Fer party, the fateful deal was struck with the highest roller, Miss Paget. She lost a fortune punting so increasingly learned to rely on Golden Miller, with his 29 triumphs, to recoup her losses. Yet she demanded too many miracles from a horse whose aggressive, veering-to-the-right jumping style, everybody else recognised, was not suited to Aintree. That he ever won there at all made his jockeys marvel. Defending his crown in 1935, Miller unseated Wilson but Paget demanded Briscoe run him again in the following day's Champion Chase. He fell at the first. Briscoe, sick of all the interference, demanded she withdrew all her horses from his stable. The loss of Golden Miller, it is said, left him a broken man. Still, Paget kept persisting in sending him to Aintree but after he stubbornly refused to budge when faced with the open ditch flanking the 11th fence, she finally got the message after a fourth National failure. Here was one fellow prepared to stand up to her. Golden Miller was going nowhere. Paget repaid her due. In retirement at the Elsenham stud which she bought unseen, she made sure Golden Miller was treated right royally. It had to be that way. As one journalist wrote, here after all was "a god on four legs." Synchronised has an impossible act to follow. And so does J.P!