Top racing and betting books of 2025: must-reads of the year, from the perfect Christmas gift to tales of old-school punting

Champion jockey Oisin Murphy opens up on battle with alcohol 

Sacrifice: A Year in the Life of a Champion Jockey by Oisin Murphy
£17.99, published by Penguin Random House

It's difficult to catch a moving target. So said Oisin Murphy this year, and although he was referring specifically to his rivals' unavailing attempts to whittle down his lead in the jockeys' championship, I'm sure his publishers must have found themselves nodding in frustrated agreement.

The trouble with Murphy is that just when you think you've found a neat, non-controversial hiatus in which to bring the writing of his memoir to a close and think about getting it on to the bookshelves, something else happens – which this year meant winning the fifth title he'd told readers he definitely wouldn't be going for, shortly after pranging his car (or somebody else's car, as it happens) and injuring the woman in the passenger seat, having drunk rather too much to be behind the wheel.

Sacrifice, though, is framed purely as a diary of 2024, and such episodes are therefore entirely absent, when this could presumably have been the ideal opportunity to clear the air. But anyone considering it as a Christmas present will want to know what is in the book, rather than what isn't, so here goes.

Murphy tells us from the outset that he views the writing of Sacrifice as an extension of his therapy and counselling, and he's very frank about his alcoholism and the ongoing nature of his addiction.

"Like me, my dad is also a recovering alcoholic," he admits, and we feel as though we're heading into uncharted waters. His dad's example, he says, has helped him greatly. Nothing could have stopped him drinking during "an incredibly difficult time in my life", and now that he's stopped drinking and gone into recovery, "I make a promise to myself at the start of each day that I won’t drink and each time I fulfil that promise I glean a tiny amount of strength".

Another key theme is a job that places incessant demands on an obsessive character. When Murphy decided not to go for the 2025 title, "it was as though I’d been unshackled from a huge boulder. I felt free. That was when I decided that I’d had enough". Is that a healthy way for a champion jockey to be – a problem to be addressed by the sport? Is it a choice to be made, or simply the inevitable price of striving to be the best in any field?

The book is at its best when attempting to answer these questions, at its most poignant when addressing the unrelenting possibility of disaster, the looming presence of the ambulance.

Murphy recalls the death of his friend Stefano Cherchi after a riding accident, and the reflections are raw but infused with a quiet kind of fatalism. He's looking into having a living will drawn up, to simplify all those awkward decisions about ongoing health care in the event of, say, serious brain injury following a fall. It's a telling moment in the story, one that distils the very essence of what it means to be a professional athlete in one of the most perilous sports of all.

This reflection comes, like most of the others, from musings in the car on the way to or from the races, or maybe on the sofa after a long day's graft; all of which lends a certain immediacy, like a personal diary opened up for mass gawping, but which also encourages a frustrating skimming of the surface when a deep dive would have served us better. The right subjects are addressed, but I have interviewed Murphy often enough to know he has more to offer when pressed.

Press too hard, however, and you might not like what you find, as in the chapter that deals with Murphy's painful, bleeding haemorrhoids, which were the cause of much consternation, a missed racecourse breath test and no doubt liberal application of a suitable cream. His indignation at the BHA's continued 'probing', if you'll pardon the expression, is a recurring theme – he admits to having behaved in untrustworthy fashion but is miffed about being treated as though he can't be trusted.

There's more than a hint of a 'circling of the wagons' mentality, but also some lucid evocations as to why that kind of attitude can emerge among a small group of athletes who lead a life that's far removed from the ordinary.

Writing the book, Murphy says, has "made me appreciate more than ever just how atypical the life of a jockey truly is . . . we’re judged and presided over by people who cannot possibly comprehend or understand the events or situations they’re adjudicating as they’ve never been there . . . and we are statistically more susceptible to drug abuse, alcoholism and depression than any other elite athlete. Yet  . . . what we do for a living is addictive and I also believe that more than ever now. Given the above, why else would we do it?"

It's a tale of addiction and compulsion, not without its flaws but shining a little light on the divide between the professional athlete and the rest of the world.
Peter Thomas

Sacrifice: A Year in the Life of a Champion Jockey is available to buy here

Oisin Murphy: 2025 has been another whirlwind yearCredit: Alan Crowhurst (Getty Images)

One punter's odyssey through the world of specials betting

The Gambler: My Secret Life in TV Betting by Rob Furber
£9.19, published by Mirror Books

I'm not a Eurovision Song Contest man, never have been. I suppose there was a mild fascination in the days of Sandie Shaw and Lulu, but I soon came to regard the whole thing as something best staved off with a ten-foot pole and viewed Abba as the spawn of Satan.

In recent years, it seems to have become altogether more ridiculous, beyond the simple injustices of political bloc voting, beyond contempt, even, to new assaults on the already slightly dodgy reputation of light entertainment.

Some people love it, I know, but I think they need their bumps feeling, so to discover there is a small but enthusiastic minority of punters who regard the 'ESC' as a viable betting proposition came as quite a shock to the system. Actually, for viable betting proposition read licence to print money, an annual feeding frenzy intended to underpin an entire economic system, supplemented, even more alarmingly, by betting action on Strictly Come Dancing, The X Factor and I'm A Celebrity, all of which I reject in their entirety on the basis that they are, how shall I put it: shameful examples of the metamorphosis of the human brain into soup.

Rob Furber, aka The Gambler, is one of those people who seems to have discovered how, by use of strategic research, psychological dark dealing and sound punting instinct, it's possible to turn all of these activities into experiences that are not only frantically enjoyable but also, and most importantly, a road to profit.

It's alarming on occasion to witness the levels of obsession that accompany the punt, but for Furber this is part and parcel of the deal, even if it turns him into – or at least ensures he remains – a loner, a man afflicted by a "spine-chilling emptiness, a gnawing sense of desolation", consumed by the punting lifestyle.

Relationships are not something he is good at or even familiar with, until one day he decides to get out there on the dating apps. Even these prove infertile ground until he broadens his search to include eastern European singles, in search of somebody, anybody, whose dream partner is, to summarise his own profile, "an arch misanthrope, extremely set in my ways, at my most content with Betfair for company poring over the odds on whatever event I am trading at the time . . . a 42-year-old man boy who refuses to grow the hell up".

In abrupt, cynical terms, seeking liaisons with Russian women who may or may not exist. You'll find yourself shouting, "No, don't do it, Rob" as you turn the pages. It seems more fraught with barmy risk than even his bets on two pandas humping at Edinburgh zoo, but he presses on, and the romance unfolds against a backdrop of Putinesque corruption and intrigue – and Eurovision.

The Gambler is a headlong jaunt through the world of the 'specials' punter – a strange breed that seems to regard the machinations of ludicrous talent shows as puzzles to be taken apart and reassembled for financial gain. They embrace the duplicitous double-dealing of The Powers That Be, as long as they can decipher them and translate them into hard cash; if they find themselves undone, however, they seem to lose their sense of humour in the same way that simple betting shop backers develop ranting conspiracy theories about their least favourite jockeys.

It's betting with a modern twist and slightly smug overtones, but deep down it's just betting, with all its psychological torture, which is how it manages to shrug off the niche fascination with specials gambling and appeal to the broader punting audience.

Does our Rob finally 'get the girl'? Well, would you admit to having found an eastern European woman 'looking for love' on a potentially catastrophic dating app, had it all gone hopelessly pear-shaped in the meantime?

Then again, would you admit to being a superfan of Eurovision? Or perhaps it's just me that still can't get over Waterloo.
Peter Thomas

The Gambler: My Secret Life in TV Betting is available to buy here

A larger-than-life throwback to the days of old-school punting

Fifty Years In The Betting Jungle: Confessions Of An On-Course Bookmaker by Gary Wiltshire and Paul Jones
£20, published by Weatherbys

To have a life that's defined in the public imagination by one single event must be a mixed blessing. Perhaps if you were Edmund Hillary, it wasn't so bad; the first man to climb Everest has quite a ring to it. If you were Gary Wiltshire, though, you might get a shade cheesed off at being known for all eternity as the man who did his absolute conkers on Dettori Day at Ascot in 1996, losing all his money, his house, his cars, his living, on one ultimately disastrous roll of the dice.

Dettori himself emerged from the day of the Magnificent Seven with his name immortalised in the record books and a second career in light entertainment assured. Wiltshire, meanwhile, became the polar opposite of a glorious success, lost £1.4 million, took four years or more to pay off the debts and faced the certainty of being asked to relive the fateful afternoon on an almost constant basis.

You could say he's been living off the moment for the last 29 years – he wrote another book on the subject called Winning It Back 14 years ago – or you could say that he's survived the traumatic losses and the damage to both his bank balance and his health, and deserves every ounce of our attention for his new collection of tales.

He's the Belly From The Telly, he's larger than life, a former 37st throwback to the days of old-school punting – before the "faceless keyboard players of today" took all the romance out of it, as he says – and while what we get from Wiltshire, now tipping the scales at a svelte 23st, isn't exactly heavyweight stuff, it's impassioned and jaunty, settles a few scores, rights a few wrongs and celebrates a world that, for better or worse, is now so far up the list of endangered species that it's practically extinct.

Now into his 70s, Wiltshire began his life in the betting ring – what his TV pal John McCririck described as "that seething mass of greed and humanity" – some 50 years ago, and a good deal of this book is devoted to the people and the shenanigans he encountered there. There are the 'characters' and their nicknames; the strokes; the big bets and the whites of people's eyes; the winning days and the inevitable calamities.

It's very personal stuff. In fact, if you knew Wiltshire back in the day, you might find yourself name-checked, along with the usual suspects (Barry Hearn and the Kray twins) and the less usual ones (Susan George and Sir Rhodes Boyson) as the memoir buzzes along at a breezy pace.

It's said in the preamble that this was a book conceived on impulse, with just six weeks' notice before its desired publication date, which does show at times, but the finer points are in some ways incidental in a book that makes no pretension to literary sophistication.

There are poignant moments – most notably Wiltshire's relationship with Fred Done, after the benevolent bookie stepped in to save his life – and flashes of honesty about the effects of the author's compulsive lifestyle on his relationships and family life, but mostly it's punting escapades, fortunes won and lost, memorable days on the track and the eternal struggle between the diamond geezers and the wrong 'uns.

Oh, yes, the Magnificent Seven makes a reappearance, but only in the penultimate chapter (with a bit more intimate detail for good measure) and not by way of an easy rehash. That may have been the day that defined Wiltshire's life, but it wasn't the only day he lived, and many of the others have been full of colour, which shines through here.

It's not Proust, but it's a remembrance of an age long since past.
Peter Thomas

Fifty Years In The Betting Jungle is available to buy here

Gary Wiltshire: popular bookmaker brings the ring back to life in this ode to the betting jungleCredit: Edward Whitaker (racingpost.com/photos)

A superb retelling of a dramatic year of racing

Racing Post Annual 2026, edited by Nick Pulford
£19.99, published by Pitch Publishing

It was not a year for predictability. 

The dethroning of Galopin Des Champs in the Gold Cup, Constitution Hill crashing out at Cheltenham and Aintree, Golden Ace, Qirat, Powerful Glory and Cicero's Gift all striking when the odds were stacked against them – not even a crystal ball could fully foretell the events of 2025. 

The string of big-race shocks may have resulted in some disastrous results for punters, but it did add a certain captivating air to the racing calendar this year. In a world in which Willie Mullins and Aidan O'Brien continue their reigns at the top of the training ranks, it was refreshing to see some surprising stories emerge from the most unlikely of circumstances and on the biggest stages. 

It makes for a year well worth recounting and has given editor Nick Pulford plenty of material to go at for the 2026 Racing Post Annual, another beautifully produced edition of this Christmas staple.

The stories of the year's big highlights are beautifully told. On the jumping front, Richard Forristal is at the helm for Mullins' remarkable 1-2-3 in the Grand National plus the crowning of new Gold Cup hero Inothewayurthinkin, while Lewis Porteous takes over to pay homage to some of Britain's biggest Flat names in Field Of Gold and Ombudsman.

Asfoora, Calandagan, Cercene, Haiti Couleurs and Daryz all earn their spots in this delightfully packed annual, which is bursting at the seams with a love and celebration of racing. 

Yet while the highs are easy to single out, reflecting on the lows is just as important. The retirements of Rachael Blackmore and Hayley Turner will leave a big absence in the weighing room, but no loss will be as keenly felt as the tragic death of Michael O'Sullivan, with the subsequent poignant success of Marine Nationale at Cheltenham captured movingly by David Jennings. 

"On the darkest of days at Thurles in early February, that beautiful young boy suffered what proved to be a fatal fall from Wee Charlie," Jennings writes. "He was gone. But never forgotten. And in Marine Nationale we all still feel like we have a piece of him around. Something to cling on to. He was the man who made him what he is."

It has been a year, for better or worse, that will live long in the memory, and with stunning photographs from Edward Whitaker and Patrick McCann, this year's annual is an exquisite insight into the emotional rollercoaster we all shared over the last 12 months. It will take a lot to top it in 2026.
Catherine Macrae

The Racing Post Annual is available to buy here

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