The murky world of bloodstock agents

Top owners are quitting horse racing because bookmakers nervous of a government and a Gambling Commission that know remarkably little about the horse-racing industry and ignore even the modicum they do know are making it harder and harder for them to have a significant bet, closing the accounts of those who refuse to acquiesce to ever more intrusive demands about their personal finances. The biggest bets, though, are made without interference from officialdom by those who buy unridden, untested and expensive racehorses before they ever set foot on a racecourse purely on their looks and their breeding. Some 12,000 thoroughbreds are born each year in Britain and Ireland and at the Newmarket October Sales alone, the background to Felix Francis’s latest novel No Reserve (Zaffre, £20), some 1,500 yearlings a year go under the auctioneer’s hammer making a total not far short of 200 million guineas.

In a foreword to his latest page-turner about skulduggery in the equine world, Felix notes that in 2016 the American colt Justify was bought as a yearling at Keeneland for $500,000. Justify’s six successes in six races included the US Triple Crown of the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes, earning him $3.8 million in stakes. That sum will be dwarfed by the $150 million he is likely to earn over 15 years as a sire, making him worth six times his own weight in gold.

But not every deal in that high-stakes world works out so well. In 1983, when Sheikh Mohammed’s Darley empire and the Irish-based Coolmore team led by John Magnier were vying crazily for the most valuable bloodstock, a son of the great Northern Dancer called Snaafi Dancer entered the ring at the Fasig-Tipton sales.