Obituary: BHA chair Joe Saumarez Smith loved racing with a fierce passion and worked tirelessly to improve the sport

The course of Joe Saumarez Smith's life, one sadly all too short but filled with remarkable achievement, was set at the age of eight. 

A mathematics teacher's innovative methods shaped the future of a pupil who would go on to sit atop the governance structure of the sport he was inspired to love. Linked to that passion was a fascination with gambling that stemmed from being taught fractions through betting odds. Shunning traditional methods, the teacher, a Mr Fitzmaurice, also ran a weekly tipping contest with mini Mars bars as the prize. Saumarez Smith was hooked.

It was an obsession that developed quickly. Trying to find winners became a daily ritual, yet it was only when he arrived at Bristol University that consistent and significant profits began to be banked. By now, the politics student had veered far from the path expected of him. Even his choice of university was somewhat radical.

Joseph William Saumarez Smith was born on September 29, 1971, the eldest son of John and Laura Saumarez Smith. John was a bookseller to royalty, the rich and the famous at the quirky Heywood Hill shop in Mayfair. A love of books was passed on from father to son – Joe believed he had Britain's second biggest racing library – but although Joe maintained the Saumarez Smith tradition of attending Winchester College, he then veered in a different direction by rejecting the idea of studying at Cambridge. He believed it would not be his sort of place, nor the students his sort of people.

Bristol proved to be perfect, not least because Saumarez Smith assembled a cohort that used statistical analysis as the basis for punting. There were also regular trips to racecourses with a friend named Betting Shop Bob. By now, Saumarez Smith was confident enough to be ringing trainers and offering advice on running plans, while he was similarly sufficiently self-assured to reach agreements with tutors that he would only attend morning tutorials, freeing up his afternoons for racing and betting. His educational prospects were not hindered. Saumarez Smith graduated with first class honours.

Having succeeded future breakfast television star Susanna Reid as editor of Epigram, Bristol's university newspaper, it was perhaps no surprise that, having first become an alumnus of the Jockey Club Graduate Programme, Saumarez Smith entered journalism. There were stints at the Racing Post and with a Bristol press agency prior to a full-time role at The Sunday Telegraph, where the young hack was soon promoted to education correspondent, partly because he had been in education much more recently than any of his more aged colleagues.

Contemporaries were certain Saumarez Smith had the potential and talent to reach the top of the profession. This was reinforced during his time at the Sunday Express, where he proved to be a highly proficient political reporter. From his Westminster base, and an office seat next to acclaimed journalist Peter Oborne, the extremely well-informed Saumarez Smith proved to be extremely effective at getting stories. What perplexed his lobby contemporaries was how he managed to do this when appearing to work only ten hours a week. The rest of his time was occupied by racing and gambling.

An extraordinarily good bet helped to persuade Saumarez Smith he should switch his focus. He had always been entrepreneurial, right back to when, as a schoolboy, he agreed a wholesale deal with a sweet shop owner and began selling cola bottles to pupils. 

He loved journalism but was dissatisfied with financial rewards that were certainly nowhere near so handsome as the £58,000 he landed in accumulator bets at the 1999 Wimbledon tennis championships. The winnings, combined with a scholarship, enabled him to enrol in an MBA course at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School. It was in the world of business that Saumarez Smith then made his fortune.

Not all his decisions were good ones – he turned down an opportunity to invest £35,000 in Betfair and thus missed out on a £9.2 million tax-free return – but many proved to be extremely astute.

Saumarez Smith initially made a killing out of co-founding and then selling education website Schoolsnet, yet it was with the gaming and gambling sector that he became synonymous. In 2001 he created management consultancy Sports Gaming and soon after hit a series of jackpots when buying up hundreds of internet domain names. Fingers were placed in plenty of pies, including numerous start-ups, while among the businesses he developed was Bede Gaming, a technology supplier to operators and lotteries.

Kicking King wins the 2005 Gold CupCredit: Whitaker Edward

Such was the demand for his expertise within the gambling sector, Saumarez Smith was once said to have been involved in more than 100 meetings at the Ice gaming conference. 

It was not only as a consultant and adviser that he took not inconsiderable sums off bookmakers. Kicking King's victory in the 2005 Cheltenham Gold Cup won him roughly £100,000 in ante-post wagers, the first bet struck when the horse was 40-1. A further £28,000 was the payout for each-way doubles placed on Kicking King and Triumph Hurdle hero Penzance. Twelve months later, he won £135,000 by following the advice of journalist friend Donn McClean and supporting War Of Attrition for the Gold Cup.

Betting on racing became a thing of the past when Saumarez Smith was appointed as a BHA director in December 2014, although he continued to punt on other sports and play poker. In June 2022 he was unveiled as the authority's new chair, replacing Annamarie Phelps following her decision not to seek another term in office. He described the role as akin to inheriting a country house. "You have it for a certain amount of time and want to make sure the roof is fixed and the foundations don't collapse," he told the Racing Post in December, just after a change to the BHA's rules extended the new chair's tenure on the board until May 2025. 

That decision reflected the respect in which Saumarez Smith was collectively held by the industry's often divided stakeholders. They valued his expert knowledge at a time when the Conservative administration was advancing new gambling legislation. They respected his desire to bring factions together as the sport settled into a new governance structure. They also recognised that Saumarez Smith was a decent, principled individual, one who was consistently unafraid to speak out about the unwillingness of some powerful individuals and organisations to prioritise the sport's long-term good over their own short-term vested interests.

An avid cyclist who enjoyed covering 200 kilometres a week each summer, Saumarez Smith made public his lung cancer diagnosis in June 2023. He confronted the disease with a matter-of-fact stoicism that amazed even close friends who already admired him for his loyalty, generosity and kindness, highlighted by extensive work for charity in areas such as prison reform and knife crime. The social and political stance of the man they saw as one of the good guys was perhaps best exemplified by his decision to send his children Matilda and Oliver to state schools.

Saumarez Smith loved racing with a fierce passion, but as BHA chair he gave the sport much more than just love. Even following his cancer diagnosis, and despite knowing the outlook was bleak, he worked tirelessly for the sport, devoting vastly more time to the position than was contractually required. He was, in effect, a near full-time member of the BHA executive team. 

Joe Saumarez Smith with Julie Harrington at Lester Piggott's memorial service in 2022Credit: Edward Whitaker

Both publicly and privately, he was also fiercely loyal to the now former chief executive Julie Harrington, with whom he worked closely, particularly on the mission to secure a levy reform deal. That industry-wide effort ultimately failed but even those representing bookmakers on the opposing side spoke about the BHA chair only in positive terms. They also welcomed his persistent attempts to expose the folly and dangers of affordability checks.

At his father's funeral, Saumarez Smith revealed that the much-loved bookseller had taught him and younger brother, George, about the etiquette of travel on the London Underground. He explained that those seeking employment at Heywood Hill were asked if they stood on escalators or walked up them. If they stood, there was no chance of a job, because, according to John Saumarez Smith: "Nobody who stands on an escalator will get anywhere in life."

Joe Saumarez Smith must have walked up every escalator he ever took. He leaves his wife Wanda, and children Matilda and Oliver.

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Joe Saumarez Smith, British racing's senior leader as BHA chair until last month, has died aged 53