Dear diary: jackpot

Harry Rose spends a day accompanying casual gambler extraordinaire, EJ Price, around the Cheltenham Festival...

By Harry Rose

The train fills with an unusual mix of tweed-clad CountrysideAlliance types and Valley wide-boys. Off to the gee-gees.

There’s a paradox with horse racing fans: on one level Britain’s class-riddled society is reflected perfectly – from the toffs who train up the horses and pop the champagne corks, to those greasy, and slightly nervous looking men you get in the bookies in the middle of the afternoon – and, on another level, well, for what other kind of sporting event would you attract both Burberry-wearing middle-aged couples from Surrey and Burberry-wearing Jack-the-lads from Swansea? Horse racing, it seems, both reflects and dismantles Britain’s divisions at the same time.

Or so I rather pretentiously suppose, sitting on the train.

A loud middle-aged man at the end of the carriage shouts into a mobile phone. He’s talking to a bookmaker who, he enthusiastically tells his friend, is paying out on top five finishes (which, I later learn, is quite rare). He’s putting £100 each way on a horse with an incomprehensible French name in the 2.35. At the other end of the carriage some men – embracing all the hallmarks of lad tedium – play poker and drink beer.

The Cheltenham festival is a big deal for racing fans. Typical is Emyr J Price, casual gambler and Cardiff criminology student: “It’s national hunt racing’s equivalent to the Olympics or World Cup,” he says. From a betting perspective “backing a winner at the festival is to solve the ultimate puzzle – more satisfying than backing any number of winners anywhere else.” Price’s enthusiasm is quite something to behold; his face like that of a schoolgirl off to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium.

What he seems most excited about is the gambling. Up against online poker, Deal or No Deal, and those late-night cons on ITV2, there’s something refreshingly old-fashioned and proper about betting on horses. No doubt it ruins countless lives and everything, and to over-romanticise it would be a bit crass, but, come on, when the lottery – essentially a voluntary tax on the innumerate – is the height of Saturday night respectability, there’s something to be said for the sport of kings.

We arrive at the course and there’s some serious research to be done. We decamp to an enormous beer tent with the Racing Post. My traditional Grand National tactic of picking the horse with the most interesting name is dismissed early on as ‘foolish’.

Lots to consider: age of horse, recent form, recent form at Cheltenham, conditions, characteristics of previous winners, odds, jockeys – all quite tricky.

Notes made, bets placed, positions assumed. Price promptly wins £60 on the first race – Nicanor at 17-2. Piece of piss, apparently. Our suits render us somewhat overdressed in the cheap seats – it seams my earlier speculation about egalitarianism in racing was a bit premature. There are plenty of executive box-style balconies and the Best Mate Enclosure is about as far away from them as you can get; the finishing straights acting as a kind of literal class divide. Still, for an extra £30 the divide can be crossed, and with the gambling market here dictating a kind of hyper-inflation, thirty quid isn’t much.

Price curses the Racing Post after failure in the next two races. This, he reasons, is inevitable – the horses here are the best, the fields big, the course hard – it’s tough to win here. He then works his way back to a profit with each way bets on horses that finish second and third. His day ends a relative success. Me? I won fuck all.

The influx of drunk Irishmen must, presumably, be a bit startling for the locals. We join the Irish in several poky downtown Cheltenham pubs.

It’s all sing-songs, Guinness and falling over – as predictable as, well, the English in Dublin, though no doubt friendlier. Frank, one of our new Irish mates has, like me, won nothing all day, and he’s pessimistic for the rest of the week. He’ll be back next year, however, and so, we agree, will we.

• Emyr J Price would later back winners in the Cheltenham Gold Cup and Grand National.

• The loud man on the train’s French horse finished near the back.