Racing demons, randy devils and a blast of hot air

IT SEEMS to be a sad but undeniable fact that anyone exposed to the world of horse-racing for any length of time is likely to become rather peculiar. Some take to drink. Others become obsessed by betting. Many - a shocking number, it now turns out - are addicted to sex in a way that makes Michael Douglas look like a novice chaser.

Quite why the sport of kings should turn the head in this way is one of life's mysteries; all we know is that those infected are never quite the same again.

It was upsetting, all the same, to realise that Graham Lord - a man so sane and calm that he managed to work for The Express on Sunday for 25 years - has, while researching the racing background for his recently published biography of Dick Francis, apparently gone clean round the twist.

Lord has a theory about the 1956 Grand National - the race in which, famously, the Queen Mother's Devon Loch, ridden by Francis, was about to win by a street when, on the run-in, the horse launched itself into the air, did the splits and, as the form books put it, "took no further part".

Some claimed that Devon Loch had jumped a shadow. Dick Francis himself thought that the noise of the crowd had been to blame for the incident. Graham Lord, however, puts the whole thing down to a fart.

What happened, according to his version, was that the horse's girths were pulled too tight at the start. After galloping at racing speed over four miles and over 30 Aintree fences, the unfortunate animal experienced an expulsion of intestinal gases so cataclysmic that he was lifted clean off the ground like a half-ton rocket.

We shall never know the truth of the matter. It is an unedifying subject, made all the less acceptable by the fact that the alleged farter was owned by our beloved Queen Mother and ridden by the most sainted thriller-writer at work today.

But there is a bigger and more interesting mystery at work here.

What is it about racing which creates these strange myths? Other sports have their scandals and oddballs, but none of them is quite so uniformly strange from top to bottom.

This year, in addition to Devon Loch, Dick Francis and endless allegations that wrong 'uns are at work as never before, there has been a stream of lurid stories suggesting a level of randiness among trainers and their wives, stable lads and lasses and, above all, jockeys, well above and beyond the national average.

In the latest edition of the Tatler, an unnamed woman who works for a National Hunt trainer in Lambourn claimed that "jockeys spend as much time as possible having sex with whomsoever." In the same article, an amateur jockey boasted that "after a race, women throw themselves at you".

Such remarks cause me a certain pang of regret. During the few years when I rode as an amateur, there was little sign of jockeys having sex with anyone whomsoever. Only a few people threw themselves at me after races, and they were usually irate punters. Maybe it was all happening and I never noticed.

Whether or not racing is run by sex addicts and crooks will be known only to those who are part of its enclosed, inward-looking world, but these stories confirm why the sport provides such a perfect backdrop for fiction. As in Restoration comedy or the Victorian novel, here is a society where extremes of human greed, lust and jealousy can run riot within a carefully stratified class system.

Personally, I rather wish that Devon Loch's fall really had turned out to have been caused by flatulence. Since Dick Francis retired from racing shortly afterwards to take up writing books, he could then be said to be the only writer at work today whose career was launched by a blast of hot air.

But then, on the other hand, maybe not.