The turf
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…
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…
The turf
A woman I once encountered at the dining table whose prime years were clearly behind her described herself as ‘approaching…
The turf
Having spent three quarters of my life covering politics and the other quarter following racing, I am often asked what…
The turf
Back on the political beat with CNN for the general election, I was reminded how politics is now dominated by…
The turf
Nobody I know has ever been interviewed by an opinion pollster. Nor do I ever encounter anybody who has won…
The turf
Most racehorse trainers, those at least who didn’t have a legacy from Aunt Agatha to lubricate their way into the…
The turf
The longer Donald Trump sits there the better Ronald Reagan looks, not least because he had a sense of humour.…
The turf
Any of us can forget little things on leaving home in a hurry. To the chagrin of Mrs Oakley, who…
The turf
Every Grand National reminds me of a hero of my youth: Beltrán Alfonso Osorio y Díez de Rivera, the 18th…
The turf
Bookmaker Paddy Power once famously declared, ‘Cheltenham is the best craic you can have and if you cannot look forward…
The turf
If the championship for training jumpers went to a set of gallops rather than to a trainer it would not…
The turf
When the generals have lost heart and crept away from the battlefield it is hard for the ground troops to…
The turf
When the generals have lost heart and crept away from the battlefield it is hard for the ground troops to…
