Posts Tagged ‘horse racing’

The Cheltenham Festival is the biggest event in the racing calendar. Only the Grand National can top it for prize money, and none can top the Gold Cup for prestige. Having spent the past four years in the gaming industry, it’s always a big week.

Most of the betting companies had a smooth week technical wise. Corals had some real problems with their website, and Bet Victor and Paddy Power had some big outages too – but everyone else came through it rather smoothly.

I made the mistake of following the tips from the racing team – and ended the week rather down. But it’s all in good fun, and I did manage three winners, just not particularly well priced ones.

Last week, the 2012 Grand National took place.

Two horses died – According To Pete and former favourite Synchronised were both put down after taking nasty falls during the race. Despite attempts to reduce the danger, such incidents aren’t a surprise. Indeed, it’s more of a surprise when we get through a Grand National without any horses losing their life.

Take a look at the list on Wikipedia. Two this year, two last year, a total of 11 over the past decade – and this is just from one race! Open it up to wider events and we see the same trend – this year’s Cheltenham Festival saw no less than five horses put down.

No wonder people are starting to question whether there is a future for horse racing.

As some of you know, I write some of my blog posts in advance and publish them a few days or weeks later, depending on how many I’ve written recently. So sometimes I will write something and it won’t actually be published on my blog until a few days later.

This Saturday is the Grand National, the most valuable race in the racing calendar and one of the most prestigious after the Gold Cup. It’s also synonymous with real outsiders taking the crown. Whether this is a justified reputation or not I’m not entirely sure, but in 2009 it was won by Mon Mone – a 100 to 1 shot (which makes for a far more exciting headline than last year’s winner, Ballabriggs, 14 to 1 price).

Anyway, this year I’m tipping Neptune Collonges. Lets see how my prediction does in the race on Saturday – which totally coincidentally is about when this blog post would be published…