Panorama: Exposing the Corruption in Horse Racing

If nothing else, at least I’m now glad that I seldom bet on Horse Racing. After watching tonight’s exposé of the corrupt circles within British Horse Racing on the BBC’s Panorama programme I doubt I’ll be betting on any races featuring Kieron Fallon, Fergal Lynch or Darren Williams to name but a few, any time soon.

Those three jockeys were implicated as being central figures in rather large gambles on Betfair that their rides would lose. Evidence was a bit sketchy but coincidences seemed, well… too coincidental.

Of course since the advent of Betfair, punters have been able to lay horses (bet that they will not win), which on the face of it is far easier than trying to predict who will win. There’s nothing illegal in that – not unless you have insider knowledge and the jockey deliberately hinders his own horse. The authorities know it happens but proving it is altogether more difficult.

The program centred around a key individual whose betting patterns had alerted Betfair’s security team. Miles Rogers was once a racehorse owner and manager of racing syndicates. This provided him with an ideal position to garner useful information from key people. He would legally lay his own horses to lose, winning upto £20,000 at a time until his activities contributed to a rule change barring owners from betting against their own horses.

This didn’t stop Rogers however as he changed his set-up but still managed to use his contacts to exploit the system. The programme told tales of jockeys leaving rendezvous with Rogers clutching white envelopes, phone calls between himself and jockeys planning to carve up race results and even text messages with crude codes disguising the jockeys inside info.

Rogers was prolific. At one stage he lost just one bet in 64. Then it started to go wrong. Drug-trafficking gangsters soon got involved in the race-rigging and Rogers was gambling money that wasn’t all his. Not only that but tips that were coming from Kieron Fallon via a middle-man were becoming unreliable – 4 races were won by the champion jockey when Miles and his cohorts expected them to be lost. The crooks lost over half a million pounds and the police feared for the safety of Fallon at one stage.

Pretty serious stuff but what does it all mean to average punter like you an I?

Well, we’ve all had tips – I’ve had two in the last week and both have lost! – they’re the sport’s lifeblood. The tantalising prospect of knowing more than the bookie or your fellow punter is what makes winning from a tip all the more special. You’ve beaten the system. But when the sport is deliberately interfered with to fix the outcome of a race then it’s nothing other than fraud.

Betfair means it’s no longer just Mr. Chandler, Hill or Done that are losing out but it’s you and me and if the sport is to survive this cannot continue. I’ve not been very impressed b the handling of the investigations so far and don’t have much confidence that much will be done to clean up the game any time soon. The question also remains of just how many corrupt individuals are fleecing ordinary punters – it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Betfair, for their part, seem to have acted impeccably throughout. They have no case to answer to other than holding the tin opener to this particular can of worms but it’s now down to the Jockey Club, BHA and the Metropolitan Police to make sure us little guys aren’t the ones getting whipped online.

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