How do we expect people to connect to racing except via betting?

Betting isn't just important to racing, it's as crucial to the sport as legs to a horse. Far from being a sordid commercial necessity endurable only because it helps keep the show on the road, betting is in fact the gateway to a sport that otherwise would be utterly impenetrable to most of society.

When I was growing up I, like most children in Britain, did not have horses. I did not ride. I did not live in a racing town, or even very near a racecourse. I had no living relatives who trained, or rode, or really had anything to do with racing at all. In short, I had no connection to the sport and I might easily have continued through my life without ever being exposed to its exotic pleasures.

Fortunately, as a young child I watched the Grand National, on which I would always be given a 50p (or so) each-way bet. For years I never won a thing and, while I revelled in the thrills and spills of the madcap Aintree marathon, I never really took any wider notice of the sport, which was remote and confusing and – to those youthful eyes – entirely unknowable.