I won't pretend to be an expert on horse-racing, first of all, lest you all start hanging on my every word for tips and subsequently slashing my tyres when it falls at the first hurdle. My gambling expertise doesn't go much beyond following Cornelius Lysaght on Twitter and picking a horse called Franklin Roosevelt on the day that I'd spent writing an essay on the Presidency (it won, by the way. One in the eye for the over-analysts). That honour went to my Dad. He always insisted his specialist subject, should he ever go on Mastermind, would be the Cheltenham Gold Cup, or horse-racing in general. A subject this broad would no doubt have put to shame Myleene Klass's efforts at answering posers on Sex and the City (Series Two). Not that he ever really used his knowledge for financial gain. He'd bet on the Grand National, out of tradition (although he was always fairly disdainful of its merits as a race), and of course, any day he went to the races, usually once a year. He followed jockeys, and tended to bet on them, as opposed to the horse. The up-and-comers. It was telling, in fact, that we ran a donation for the Injured Jockeys Fund at his funeral, for which we received a beautiful card thanking us.
A delicate subject, but other members of my family have fallen foul of the curse of horse-racing, something which my Dad stayed well clear of. He watched it simply for pleasure, interest, and, what's more, to doctor the work of Rudyard Kipling, he 'never breathed a word about his winnings'. That was to us anyway...
'How did you do today?'
'Broke even, really'.
It was always slightly baffling when, therefore, the next fortnight he might have taken us out for dinner.
His love for horse-racing, as far as I know, stemmed from my Great Uncle Mick, the eccentric fella with the flat cap who's looked out for us immeasurably over the last two years. At 82 (I think), he still seems to know the best tip for the 3:10 at Chepstow, usually thanks to his mate down at the fish market. And to think you all thought I was from thoroughly middle class stock...
My Dad also always said that the first thing he'd do if he won the lottery would be to buy a racehorse. Not that this would have been our family's first foray into owning a four-legged running thing, as the following anecdote will display. I already know it's many of my friends' favourite anecdotes ever, so bear with me if you've heard it before.
Mick: 'Have I told you about the time me and your Dad and some friends got a really highly regarded greyhound over from Ireland between us and ran it over here?'
Me: 'I don't think so... is this going to be another made up story, like Mr Isles who shaved the cat?'
Mick: 'Well, basically, we brought it over for its first race, and it's really sad but... well, in Ireland it had been used to running on straight tracks... on its first race on an oval track, it kept on running and went straight into the wall at the end'.
The best thing about that story is I have absolutely no idea if it's true or not.
On what I think was my thirteenth birthday, my Dad took me to Warwick races, where we proceeded to lose every single race. He reminisced further that day.
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| Great Uncle Mick- Conman Extraordinaire and Scourge of Greyhounds |
Dad: 'There's the trainers' car park... Mick always looked like a trainer in his flat cap so almost every time we came here we just got him to tip the peak of his cap, say 'cheers mate' to the attendant and got in for free.'
Me: 'We're not doing that today are we?'
Dad: 'I've got a flat cap in the boot to be fair...'
It's some coincidence that my grandparents, on my Mum's side, live a stone's throw from Cheltenham Races. - a neatness that knits this wonderful family affair together. The local knowledge of the area has led to my Nan and her friends either taking in Irish lodgers in their beautiful Cotswold village, or gladly informing with pride anyone brave enough to ask for a short-cut to the races. On his first trip to their new house, I'm told my Dad looked out the window and did a little jig of childish glee when he surveyed the Cotswolds and pointed at the Grandstand far in the distance. From then on, he would always take the week of the Cheltenham Festival off work, even if it was just to sit in front of the telly.
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| A great photo of my Dad in amongst the throng- I'm assured my Mum wasn't checking how much he was putting on... |
The Times' Simon Barnes, probably the finest sports journalist around (although he has recently turned his hand more to nature articles, in my view a shame), wrote a wonderfully powerful piece in the wake of the tiresome horse-meat scandal about why the nation was in such a pitchfork-wielding state. It was a love for horses that had been butchered- the noble steed, the beautiful thorough-bred- and the line had been crossed. It explains why there has been so much uproar in certain circles as to why Kauto Star, two-time Gold Cup winner, won't be allowed to live out his retirement in glorious, studding peace, and instead must be made to traipse down to the other end of the country as little more than a show-pony.
It's fitting, really, that in a sport where winning and losing can have such high stakes, I 'won' my tickets (VIP!) for tomorrow's day of racing in a competition on Twitter. I doubt I'll sleep tonight, and am immensely looking forward to taking a good friend of mine with me. He won't mind me saying that if my Dad was still around, he'd have knocked Matt over in the rush to take the ticket, there with his boots black and a copy of the Racing Post under his arm. Indeed, I felt a very strange twinge when I won the tickets, desperate to text that extra person my good news.
Doubtless there'll be one or two tears shed by this blogger when the famous Cheltenham roar rises up, as the curtain lifts on another year of 'The Greatest Show on Turf'.
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