It was Descartes, lamenting Pari Mutuel misfortune, who proclaimed: “I bet, therefore I am sometimes forced to sleep on the sofa.” Since Adam said to Eve, “I bet that’s a Golden Delicious,” man has bet. And lost.
The first evidence of mankind’s interest in gambling is to be found in Palaeolithic cave paintings of Scoop 6 selections in the Tommo district of Newmarket. Archaeologists refuse to be drawn on speculation that all selections lost.
In between waiting for the end of the world, and planning famine and pestilence, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse raced at Southwell. They scythed through the opposition, until a well-treated Barney Curley work horse did them on the line. Satan’s Dark Princes refused to comment, but the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, speaking exclusivley to ‘At The Races,’ complained bitterly about the kick-back.
After a hard day’s thinking, Plato and Socrates settled down for a night in front of the television. “My dear friend,” spake Socrates, “the Trojan horse is running at Athens Park this evening, oh how did he do?” Plato reached for the remote control and with the flick of a button, they became the first humans to watch a race live on Ceefax. After twelve agonising minutes, they discovered the Trojan horse lost by a (wooden) head to Pegasus. Socrates was to later sit in front of Ceefax for ninety minutes and watch his beloved Thessaloniki FC fight out a 0-0 draw.
The headline of the infamous tabloid ‘The Roman Sport,’ screamed “BEN HUR DROPS HANDS.” This wasn’t a medical update on the Hur family’s leprosy, but the first recorded case of a top jockey committing the cardinal sin. The biggest scandal to hit the Roman sporting world, since the Three-Day-Eventer Queen Boadecia was filmed leaving Caesar’s Wine Bar in a state of undress. To further confuse matters, Ben Hur claimed he was being impersonated by a wooden actor from The Americas by the name Charlton of Heston.
And so it came to pass that Jesus Christ turned water into wine, fed five thousand with five loaves and a bit of fish, but for all his efforts, he couldn’t ride seven winners in one afternoon at Ascot.
The Dark Ages were…er, very dark. The Doomsday Book records how the Big Three Beasts from the Home Counties, repressed all punting serfs. Any dissenting serfs had their stakes burnt. But out of the darkness came the light of the fe-mail’s laptop and McCririck-the-Hairy-One, the Lord of the Betting Rings, fought a crusade for the rights of the little punting serf. This crusade was temporarily put on hold, whilst McCririck-the-Hairy-One appeared on Celebriterium Biggo Brothero (he sat up a tree in a pair of y-fronts which had previously been the mast of large galleon and sulked for a week, bemoaning a lack of diet elderberry juice). Over the Irishe Sea, in a hamlet called Ballydoyle, a small wizard called Aidan was quietly putting together a formidable stable. In time, the racing worlde would be his.
The insistence of the Metaphysical Philosophers that the material world did not exist had a profound effect on Brig. Cecil Vernon Wingfield-Stratford, Jockey Club President. The good Brigadier decreed Horse Racing should be run without the horses and the stewards would decide the winner based on the tactical hypotheses advanced by Connections and design of the jockey silks. The material world was proven to exist, however, when a leading jockey of the day took a bung and pulled himself up at Bangor-on-Dee. Logic was to never darken the sacred portals of the Jockey Club again.
