How do you solve a problem like fixed odds betting terminals?
You can tell by the tone of the jokes how most occupations are regarded and we’ve all heard the traditional…
What makes a champion jockey
Write a few books and you have to listen politely at parties as people who have never opened yours tell…
Everyone is talking about the little girl from Devon
If there hasn’t yet been a hurricane called Bryony there should be. The impact of Bryony Frost, just 22, this…
Why I’ll chain myself to an earthmover at Kempton Park
I have never been one for system betting but one little piece of guidance returns to my mind at the…
Robin Oakley: Why Jeremy Clarkson should stick to cars
Jeremy Clarkson wrote recently about a day at Newbury. He declared: ‘Claiming that horses are different is like saying ants…
Robin Oakley: Let’s hear it for the girls
It has been a good year for the girls. The filly Enable was the horse of the year, winning not…
The dark side of horse racing
Spotting Mark Grant’s name on an Ascot racecard, I remembered a dashing young mop-haired rider I first encountered some years…
Forget temples and tea – Sri Lanka is all about its birds
Standing in sweaty silence for an hour on a precipitous sliver of muddy footpath above a waterfall may not be…
My hot tips for the jump season
Richard Johnson may already have 100 winners in the bag, and Paul Nicholls may already have banked £750,000 worth of…
The founding father of bookmaking
Imagine Ryan Moore getting caught on the line by a rival’s late spurt at the end of a Newmarket race…
The turf
Racing’s finances depend on as many people as possible betting, so it seemed a touch ironic that Responsible Gambling Awareness…
The turf
The mission was simple: take a load of garden refuse to the council dump and be back in time to…
The turf
Racing is an expensive sport to stage. Courses and grandstands have to be maintained, health and safety regulations have to…
The turf
Racing moves off the back pages only when its opponents have bad news to gloat over. Two examples lately have…
The turf
I guess his mother may have called him Patrick, or even, when he was in trouble, ‘Patrick Joseph’, but in…
The turf
‘Racing isn’t a team sport,’ the diehards used to tell us about the Shergar Cup, Ascot’s annual contest for three-rider…
The turf
Khalid Abdullah, John Gosden and Frankie Dettori — owner, trainer and jockey — already figured among the great names of…
Numbers game
‘After a few decades of marriage a man ought to be able to recognise his own wife,’ Mrs Oakley observed…
Twelve to follow
It has been a little like scraping from the plate as slowly as possible the last traces of Mrs Oakley’s…
Sandown thrills
The difference between praying in church and praying at the racecourse, a gnarled old punter once said, is that at…
National review
With great victories in Flat racing you witness hats-in-the-air exultation. You see the pride of trainers who nurtured the winner…
My Cheltenham misery
Everybody has their glory memory from Cheltenham this year. Some celebrate the extraordinary seven victories for the quietly confident Willie…
Farewell to Fergie
Writing a Turf column before the Cheltenham Festival, as the Spectator schedule requires, which you are reading only after the…
Nice guys do finish first
Richard Johnson, possibly the nicest man to occupy a saddle and certainly the most modest, once said of his Irish…
King of the hills
There are now two Kings of the Marlborough Downs. Leading jumps trainer Alan King has long trained top horses at…
