Legendary horse racing magnate John Patrick ‘J.P.’ McManus has been Champion National Hunt Owner in his native Ireland 17 times and, while he has been usurped in that respect by Gigginstown House Stud in recent years, he remains far and away the most succesful owner in the history of the Cheltenham Festival. Seven winners at the 2020 Cheltenham Festival, including a 1,019/1 four-timer on Ladies’ Day, won him the Bentley Leading Owner Award and extended his record winning tally to 66.

Indeed, McManus’ gold and green hooped colours have become such a familiar sight in the winners’ enclosure at Prestbury Park, it is hard to imagine a time when had yet to add his name to the Festival scoresheet. Of course, there was such a time and it would be fair to say that the Cheltenham Festival has not always provided rich pickings for the man once known as the ‘Sundance Kid’.

In 1978, his Jack Of Trumps was sent off odds-on favourite for the National Hunt Chase, but came to grief, and the following year, Deep Gale, who was rated a ‘real certainty’ by trainer Edward O’Grady – and backed accordingly – met a similar fate in the same race. In fact, it was not until the second day of the 1982 Cheltenham Festival that McManus finally broke his duck.

McManus later described victory for Mister Donovan, ridden by Tommy Ryan, in the Sun Alliance Novices’ Hurdle as ‘very special’, coming off the back of what was, by his own admission, ‘a disastrous first day’. Mister Donovan reportedly won McManus £250,000, without which, he later reflected, any subsequent racehorse ownership might not have been possible. Mister Donovan was trained, like Jack Of Trumps and Deep Gale, by Edward O’Grady and had previously been diagnosed with a pronounced heart murmur. O’Grady later joked that McManus’ first Cheltenham Festival winner ‘was a maiden with a heart murmur.’

Interviewed in December, 2016, veteran professional gambler Barney Curley said he did not think he would ever have another bet but, for decades, the son of County Fermanagh was the scourge of the bookmaking fraternity on both sides of the Irish Sea. Indeed, in 1975, at the age of 37, Curley orchestrated what has become one of the most famous betting coups in British and Irish horse racing history.

Down on his luck after a series of adverse results, Curley turned to Curragh trainer Liam Brennan, with a view to ‘landing a touch’ and restoring his fortunes. Brennan identified a suitable candidate in the form of Yellow Sam, whose overall form was poor, having finished no better than eighth in nine starts, albeit on unfavourably soft ground, but had improved, according to his trainer. Yellow Sam was duly entered at Bellewstown on June 26, 1975 and, that day, Curley employed runners to place bets, between £50 and £300, at betting shops, large and small, in major towns across the country.

Bellewstown is a small, provincial racecourse in Co. Meath which, at the time, was serviced by a single public telephone, which was the only means by which betting shops could convey betting intelligence back to the course and influence starting prices. Curley dispatched his trusted friend Benny O’Hanlon, a thickset, tough-looking man, to occupy the telephone 25 minutes before the ‘off’ and not to surrender it, to anyone, under any circumstances. O’Hanlon played his part perfectly, carrying on a conversation with a fictitious hospital about his equally fictitious dying aunt until the race was underway and any damage was done.

All told, Curley wagered just over £15,000 on Yellow Sam and, with bookmakers unable to contact their representatives at Bellewstown and ‘lay off’ their liability, managed to protect a generous starting price of 20/1. Yellow Sam duly obliged, with a minimum of fuss, netting Curley in excess of £300,000, or the equivalent of £2.47 million, adjusted for inflation at 5.0% a year, on average, although no single betting shop faced a liability of over £6,000.

Curley originally trained as a Jesuit priest, until contracting tuberculosis, from which he took some time to recover; although no longer the force of old, at least in gambling terms, Curley focuses his attention on Direct Aid for Africa, the charity he founded in 1996, which has raised millions of pounds for children in Africa, mainly Zambia.

What became known as the ‘Trodmore Hoax’ was one of the greatest betting scams of all time, ingenious in its conception and almost, almost perfect in its execution. In late July, 1898, a correspondent who signed himself ‘G. Martin, St. Ives, Cornwall’ contacted ‘The Sportsman’ with comprehensive details of a forthcoming race meeting to be held by the Trodmore Hunt Club, in Trodmore, Cornwall on Bank Holiday Monday, August 1.

His correspondence, on headed notepaper and bearing a Trodmore postmark, informed the editors that further information would be supplied by the Clerk of the Course, based at the Fox and Hounds Hotel, Trodmore, in due course. Everything appeared to be in order and the full, six-race card duly appeared in the Monday edition of ‘The Sportsman’. In the absence of the regular West Country correspondent, Mr. Martin suggested that, for a small fee, he could cover the meeting, exclusively, for the newspaper and wire the results at the end of the day. That he did and they appeared in the Tuesday edition of ‘The Sportsman’.

Of particular interest to the bookmaking fraternity was the winner of the fourth race, the unheralded but evidently well-backed Reaper, who was returned at 5/1. Reaper had been subject to a flurry of cash bets in public houses across London and the following day his supporters returned to collect their winnings. The ‘exclusivity agreement’ with ‘The Sportsman’ meant that the Trodmore results did not appear in the rival sporting daily ‘The Sporting Life’; some bookmakers paid out, but others awaited confirmation in the latter publication.

Under pressure from disgruntled readers, the editors of ‘The Sporting Life’ chose not to take the ‘official’ results from Mr. Martin, but simply copied them directly from ‘The Sportsman’. However, in so doing, they misprinted the starting price of Reaper as 5/2, rather than 5/1, leading to further investigation by those bookmakers who hadn’t paid out and, more importantly, those that had. It transpired that Reaper, Trodmore Hunt Club and even Trodmore itself were all entirely fictitious and that bets on the ‘winner’ were placed by an army of accomplices of the aforementioned ‘Mr. Martin’ – later dubbed the ‘Trodmore Syndicate’ – much to the embarrasment of the newspapers and bookmakers involved. The enormity of the hoax was lessened, to some extent, by a simple printing error, but still cost bookmakers an estimated £100,000, or over £13 million by modern standards.