Cheltenham thrives on nuance - and proves complexity can be a good thing

Some years ago I was intrigued by the thoughts of a senior executive at French betting giant PMU, a man who – as well as having access to opinion polls and focus groups – was the father of children in their late teens and felt he had some insight into what made a sport attractive for young people to bet on.

He argued that racing needed to offer more binary choices; bets of the sort where the player was invited to side with one jockey over another throughout an entire card, in the same way that they might pick home or away to win a basketball match.

That conversation returns to my mind on a regular basis when arguments surface about the need to free the sport of some of its more perplexing – and, some would argue, off-putting – terminology and customs.