Educating young minds is the way to lay foundations for a healthy relationship with gambling

Stan Cottle bookmakers in Cardiff in the 1980s was to me a place of escapism and learning. The chap who peeled the carbon paper betting slips in this windowless oasis taught me to always pay tax on my bets, and that scrawling "first past the post" would rightly come in handy one day.

Perhaps it was my school uniform that brought out his avuncularity. Even through the dense afternoon smoke, he spotted that his earnest underage customer was trying to unravel a world in which audio commentaries lasted twice the length of races and navigating the unwieldy broadsheet that was The Sporting Life merited the equivalent of a Duke of Edinburgh Bronze award. 

I was nearly always listening out for just two words, the second of which was Piggott. I was rumbled by my mother long before my Cottle man acknowledged us in the street. She played the game and asked about our acquaintance, then laughed when this then twice-on-a-Sunday churchgoer scrambled to assign him as our milkman.

Back then, gaming machines came mostly in the form of Space Invaders and Pac-Man, adding noise, colour and juvenile nuisance to the local laundrette. My friends and I were captivated with racing, betting and whirring spin cycles but were left to learn on the job – our analogue tastes visible and aided by guardrails of a slower-moving world.

At the charity Racing to School, we’re often asked if odds are referenced to help explain maths within our racecourse-based programme. They’re not, and betting topics rarely surface when working with around 18,000 annual participants.

However, gambling’s lingua franca travels full fibre, saturating parts of intergenerational media without explanatory subtitles. Deciphering anything new, even if the law encourages fingers in ears for under-18s, requires context and a north star.

Students of Racing to School are taught about every aspect of the sport Credit: Mark Cranham

Racing’s consistent, supportive words for those struggling with gambling-related harm are authentic but is that enough from a sport for which betting is a lifelong financial surrogate?

"Education breeds confidence," said one-time horse groom, Confucius. And Generation Alpha’s confidence to ask questions should be encouraged and matched with racing’s answers, to share knowledge and inform safe choices.

As individuals, we can have early conversations about gaming and arcade games, to lay foundations for a healthy relationship with gambling. We know they do it, whether between themselves or more surreptitiously.

We always remember where good, open advice came from, even if it wasn’t delivered with the milk.
John Blake is CEO of Racing to School and a former trustee of the Gordon Moody charity, one of the leading suppliers of treatment and support for gambling-related harm

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