By Steve Davies
March 16, 2018. Gold Cup day. It’s always a great occasion, always a great race, but that one seemed more special than most as Native River and Might Bite slugged it out in one of the most gruelling, compelling and thrilling contests to grace a Cheltenham Festival.
It was one of those epic ‘remember where you were’ sporting events that would live long in the memory, Native River getting up after the pair had gone stride for stride over three and a quarter pulsating miles.
Patrick Foster certainly remembers where he was when those special chasers crossed the line and a 70,000 crowd erupted, roaring their approval at the end of a remarkable race. But he wasn’t cheering.
Foster knows exactly where he was that day, indeed that whole week, a week that would change his life; in fact, almost ended his life.
It’s a story he has told in an astonishing book, Might Bite, a harrowing tale of the final moments of a gambler’s descent to near destruction, but it’s a tale that demands to be retold. And when it’s told by Foster himself, it’s humbling.
“I’d managed to get myself out of situations before but by March 2018 life had become pretty much unmanageable,” says the 35-year-old former cricketer and gambling addict.
“I’d basically lived a double life for more than 12 years and it had become so hard to sustain, it was so exhausting. I knew I was going to get found out and it triggered an extraordinary set of circumstances when I basically thought my time was up.”
The origins of this fall can be traced to university days, when Foster popped into a high street bookmaker for the first time. A first-year student at Durham dreaming of a career in cricket, he had been persuaded to go in by friends and, while they were placing their bets, the 19-year-old was drawn to the fixed-odds betting terminal.
“I didn’t have a clue what was going on,” he recalls. “It was an eye-opener to me.
“I watched this guy playing a FOBT, watched him punch it, kick it. He was playing roulette, feeding £20 notes into it for ten minutes, and I just thought ‘I’ll have a go at this’. I put £2 on green zero, it came in, I won £72, and I guess my life changed forever.
“Weirdly, I never got that feeling again, that feeling of your first win, although I would spend the best part of 13 years chasing that feeling. And there wasn’t a day that went by over those 13 years when I didn’t have a bet. I was absolutely hooked.”
Foster had gone to Durham with a cricket career in mind. He was on Northamptonshire’s books at the time and in one of his first matches for Durham MCCU, the promising fast bowler removed England batsman Jason Gallian and Australian star David Hussey.
Fiercely competitive, very driven, by his own admission he had an “addictive personality, was impulsive and compulsive”. All creditable characteristics in someone aiming for sporting stardom – but when he was released from Durham’s centre of excellence at the end of his first year those same personality traits would prove toxic as the gambling habit kicked in.
“That rejection really hit me,” he says. “And that was when the gambling really stepped up. It was the closest thing I could find to replicating the buzz and rush of sport. I could get it on tap every day and that’s where it started to become different.”
And never was that more pronounced than after graduation when he moved to London to work as an insurance broker. Suddenly, with cash in his pocket amid a money-making culture, he effectively had a licence to bet on the grandest and most damaging scale.
“I became a lot more secretive,” he recalls. “And then in December 2010 I won the best part of £35,000 on a football accumulator and that was a massive turning point. That gave me the feeling of invincibility.
“That said to me three things: one, I kidded myself I could make a fortune out of this – I could make it pay; two, I’d proved to myself I could win big so even if I went on a losing run it didn’t matter because a big win would follow; and three, I went from putting £10, £20, occasionally £50 on a horse to putting a grand and more on because now I’d tasted £35,000 and I wanted to win huge.
“And what I never appreciated was that winning big is when you are at your most vulnerable. Almost everyone I’ve met with a gambling addiction has had a big win at some point. That’s when it started to get totally out of control.”
Foster left London the following year and went home to his parents, determined to do the one thing that he implores anyone in his situation to do, and that’s talk to someone. “But I couldn’t do it,” he says. “My biggest fear was letting them down. Finding the strength to reach out makes such a difference – but it’s an easy thing to say, it’s a bloody hard thing to do.”
Among the many reasons he backed out of confiding in his parents was that he was about to start a teaching job in Oxford, a ray of hope in an otherwise bleak landscape. And for a while things were looking up.
But then came the holidays, the long days with nothing to do, and the gambling railcar was up and running again, careering towards the buffers with nothing to stop it. Which is an unfortunate metaphor given how this part of the story ended, in 2018, a few days after the curtain came down on the Cheltenham Festival.
“The school knew what was going on and my day of reckoning was arriving,” he says. “I faced losing my job, my house, I faced a criminal conviction because I’d borrowed money, forged signatures, signed contracts, made up guarantors, all these things you do out of desperation. And I knew there was no way I could lie my way out of this.
“And, bizarrely, I thought the only way out was winning my way out. So I borrowed money from someone I had already borrowed off and during the festival I set upon trying to turn £10,000 into half a million in four days. I literally gambled all day, every day, betting on everything, not just the festival, it was a total roller-coaster.
“I won £58,000 on the Thursday afternoon but time was running out and I thought I could do only one thing. It had become a matter of life and death – win, and my life goes on, lose and, well . . .”
And so Foster, a man who at his peak had 76 different accounts, 65 in other people’s names, and in one year alone on one of those accounts placed close to 28,000 bets, went for the big one. He piled £50,000 to win on Might Bite, went into class and, while the children sat there doing their work, he watched the Gold Cup unfold on his laptop and saw his world fall apart.
“It was the silence afterwards,” Foster notes on seeing his one hope of perceived salvation beaten by four lengths. “It was eerie. It was as though the children knew.”
Broke, indebted and knowing his teaching career would soon be over, days later Foster stood on the edge of the platform at Slough train station contemplating what he thought was his only solution.
“That was the point when, weirdly, something was going through my head that I had to tell someone. So I did. I told my brother. And he reacted as only he would and basically talked me down.
“It was the message I needed to hear and finally, finally, it made me put other people first. In those seconds my life had been saved. I knew I had to come clean, and I did, and the weight of the world felt like it had been lifted off my shoulders. Finally, I felt I could move forward, take a journey in the right direction.”
It’s a heartbreaking story but at least Foster, married now, 35 years old and with a baby boy just a few weeks old, can look forward. “I think I’m in recovery rather than recovered but every day that goes past I’m further away from a bet,” he clarifies.
Now, more than four years into that recovery, Foster is director of education for Epic Risk Management, the leading gambling harm minimisation organisation. He is also an ambassador for the Mintridge Foundation, a charity which uses sporting role models to empower young people.
“I’m there,” he adds, “to say I had these opportunities. I didn’t make the most of them and this is what can happen.”
And he loves nothing more than going into schools, sports clubs and companies and getting those messages across. “I always say if just one talk can make a difference and save someone from going through what happened to me, then it was a talk worth doing. Life is precious. I appreciate that perhaps more than many.
“I guess if I had one message, it would be that betting can be fun, but if it becomes anything other than that you need to do something about it there and then. Gambling is never a solution for a problem gambler, either financially or as a way of coping with how you are feeling.
“The impact it had on my mental health, the opportunities and time I lost, the relations it affected, were far worse than the money I lost.”
Patrick Foster is the author of Might Bite: The Secret Life of a Gambling Addict (Bloomsbury, £14.99). Available to buy now