Wednesday 8 October
Daqman delivered yet again yesterday when he targeted six races and had a winning bet in three of them.
For the 138th time he successfully laid a morning favourite, Torphichen (unplaced 3-1 fav). His lays are on 78%.
Then he made it three winning races in a row at Leicester, following Torphichen with Hurricane Harriet (won 11-2) and a good bet on the nose on the unraced Sirocco Breeze (won 3-1).
Daqman is celebrating his birthday week– his column is a year old on Sunday - with a look at some aspects of his racing life. 
Once upon a time, there was a racehorse so bad that even Lester Piggott couldn’t win on it and connections were well pleased when it dead-heated in a five-furlong seller (good riddance!) except that the horse was called Red Rum and, when later trained by a used-car salesman behind his garage, became one of the legends of the sport.
There was once a champion jockey who rode the 1-33 (yes, 33-1 on) favourite in a two-horse race and it threw him at the start.
And then there was a chairman of the Tote – I have known two of them - who had a horse that was such a prolific winner that they named a race after it, yet his trainer was never once able to tell him when the horse was going to win.
Do I need to go on, Bill? My local betting-shop anorak is always telling me: ‘They’ know what’s going to win so ‘what chance does the punter have?’
Yet Bill as a boy was watching TV, when ‘all the horses fell’ at the same fence in a race at Liverpool in 1967, all that is except a ‘no-hoper’ who went on to win at a Tote return of 444-1. That was Foinavon’s Grand National.
And he was in the crowd at Ascot that day in 1996 when a jockey couldn’t stop winning, rode seven in a row and is said to have cost the bookies £50million at accumulative odds of 25,095-1. That was Frankie Dettori.
A couple of generations back, my family worked for a man called Elsey, one of a great family of Northern trainers which saddled winners for the best part of a century; an Elsey held the record for the highest number of individual Flat wins in a season until Henry Cecil came along.
A Yorkshire-based Elsey broke the Newmarket stranglehold on the Guineas by winning the 2,000 in 1953 (Nearula) and the 1,000 twice in 1949 (Musidora) and 1956. Musidora also won the Oaks.
But, though he was brought up with racing, my father thought the man was mad when our neighbour, a farmer and point-to-point trainer, sold ‘the lot’, his house and stables - and ‘the clothes he stood up in’ - and put it all on a horse in the Derby.
This character had paid for those stables before the war by having a year’s wages on James J Braddock to beat Max Baer for the world heavyweight boxing title. Braddock seemingly had little or no chance but the ‘Cinderella Man’ won as 10-1 underdog.
Now the ‘mad farmer’ was risking his all. He made his pick of the Derby field and put ‘everything’ on a horse called Airborne, just because he’d served in the RAF. Airborne became the last grey to win the Derby. At 50-1.
Anorak Bill should have known me the day I, myself, owned the winner of a race at Hamilton in the 1980s. I was so sure it would lose, I didn’t bother to go up. The trainer, too, thought it had no hope and went to his local for a pint and a game of pool.
The track was bog-deep in mud and most of the runners went over to the unraced side. Mine ploughed a lone furrow and won at 16-1.
But Bill was lucky to have missed the show when I owned a 9-4 favourite over fences at Market Rasen. We knew he was ‘a thinker’ but our jockey had kidded him into a couple of placed efforts; this was his big chance and you wouldn’t have guessed he was quirky as he went round the first circuit, head in chest, on a tight rein, looking like a good thing. I was counting my money.
But, as soon as the rider applied the aids and got serious, the beast slowed and dangled its off-fore and there was a groan from the stands.
The jockey quickly reined him in and jumped off, suspecting a broken leg. But the old horse immediately walked away sound. He’d beaten us at our own game of kidology: he should have been a circus act.
Moral of my meandering tale of mixed fortunes: don’t take anything for granted; don’t bet beyond your means; but do have a flutter (Daq Multiples? Ante-post?).. just about anything can happen!
The most prolific jumps jockey I have seen is, of course, Tony McCoy (Jeff King was the most stylish, Fred Winter the greatest horseman) and I’ll bet that A.P. gets at least one home from his McManus rides at Exeter today.
Sunnyhillboy (2.20) is the kind of improver you look for making his hurdles debut mid-handicap in a Class 4; Present Gale (3.50) has a drying day and four years in hand of perennial runner-up Cobreces.
Advisor (2.40 Nottingham) is as good as Four Winds at home, which is useful information here as Four Winds accounted for today’s favourite, Alanbrooke, at Sandown three weeks ago.
I have no news of how much improvement Alanbrooke (half-brother to a Champion Stakes winner) has made in the meantime, so I will banker Advisor each way, my place stake potentially bringing in up to 80% insurance for my win bet.
Red Jade (4.10) was to have been my banker but is seemingly left with little to beat and will, therefore, be short. I’ll put him in my Daq Multiples and switch my maximum win stakes to Dubai Echo.
Dubai Echo (3.10) is up there with the best of Stoute’s and I would get on early: he ‘blitzed clear’ of his lead over the weekend, says my man on the Heath. He is a cut above average and needed the run badly on the debut. Worked better than Newmarket third The Fonz on the Limekilns.
My outsider of the day is Lizard Island (8.50 Kempton) at 13.5 on Betdaq as I write. The Group-2 winner for Ballydoyle, now with Jane Chapple-Hyam, had a fair enough season in Dubai and is dropped several grades from a Listed return to racing in UK. |
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