racing's relationship with betting.

​In the beginning, a hackneyed phrase that no respectable writer, a journalist on the Racing Post, for instance, would ever use as an opening statement, but if it was good enough for the compilers of the Christian Bible it’s good enough for an aging atheist like me. So, in the beginning there was betting, one man proposing that his horse could gallop faster than a friend’s horse and wagering a solid amount of money to cement his conviction. In steeplechasing, anyway, that year was 1752 when Mr. O’Callaghan rode a match against Mr. Edmund Blake across country from Buttevant church to St. Leger church. The winner is unrecorded, as is the amount wagered, though historians to a man always put forward Mr. O’Callaghan and Mr. Blake as the instigators of the sport that became known as National Hunt. And bless their little cotton socks for the blessing they passed on to us all.
Flat racing goes back many a long year before steeplechasing was born, so who struck the first bet against his friend or rival is lost to the mists of time but you can bet your bottom dollar that a wager and a boast were involved.
Apart from the Grand National and if I should go racing, which as I get older and less inclined to travel further than the local shops would be a very rare event indeed, I do not bet. I do though, I admit, chance my arm twice a week on the Lottery, named after, I fool myself into believing, the inaugural winner of the Grand National. If I stopped ‘investing’ £10 per week on a Lottery that in the main generates income for the British government and the Ontario Teachers Retirement Plan (what!) or donating it to ‘good causes’ and redirected that money to my local bookmaker, I suspect, even given my poor record as a tipster, I would be if not exactly up on the exercise I would not be quite so much down on the exercise. At least at my local bookmakers, to go by my recent record on the Grand National, I would have the occasional winner.
To think of horse racing without betting is to think of the U.S. without a president, Lewis Hamilton without virtual signalling or Laurel without Hardy. Although I often think the glove is either a little too tight or too large for the hand, the link has long survived and is integral to the sport’s past, present and future. Certainly, at one point, not too many years ago, the tail was definitely wagging the dog. The influence the bookmaking industry was having on the sport has in recent years been reined in a smidgeon but its grasp though removed from the trouser region remains clutched to the breast pocket.
Both the sport and government require the betting industry to survive and thrive, not that you would think that is the case given the legislation and law Parliament has thrown at bookmakers over the past few years. Why allow gaming machines in betting shops, for instance, and then restrict their appeal and usefulness to customers, betting shops and the racing industry?
To return to ‘the beginning’. Or at least the Edwardian period, the period of racing history when the racecourse journeyed from being a disreputable venue frequented by villains of every hue to, and this in the main was due to the efforts of the admirable Admiral Henry Rous, the sport’s first great and perhaps greatest administrator, a place where high society congregated and some members of the aristocracy wagered away family fortunes as if compelled either by duty or a pact done with the devil. To give but one instance: George Alexander Baird is reported to have gambled away £2-million, which today equates to over £70-million. If Gamblers Anonymous was around in 1775 their advisors would have been dispensing their advice at some very high tables whilst worrying over which spoon to use for the brown Windsor.
In the Edwardian period, the owners of racehorses were divided into two distinct camps. Aristocrats and nobleman who owned horses to win the classics to enhance the reputation of their studs and those, people recently moneyed, who owned horses to hoodwink the handicapper to pull off spectacular gambles. And if all else failed, bribe or blackmail grooms or trainers, both of whom were little more than servants, to nobble a favourite by any means possible, with laming, poisoning and eventually doping all distinctly acceptable.
I am an advocate of a system of funding for horse racing that would depend on racing financing and running its own Tote, with all profit from gambling on the sport going into the sport’s coffers, the same as it is in most other racing jurisdictions. Bookmakers would survive without racing as today horse racing is not their only stream of income, which was the case until comparatively recently. In fact, in my rather naïve conception of things as they could be in the future, bookmakers could become agents of the sport, earning a commission on bets taken on horse racing.
Betting, though, will always be part and parcel of the sport. Realistically, it cannot be any other way.