We are just one week away.
Seven bundles of 24 hours and we will be there.
There will be Tricolors and Guinness and Deaths of Horses.
There will be memories of the Brigades and the Famine.
There will be Rigged Races and Insider Gambles landed.
But, most astonishingly and, consequently, most worthy of comment in this shoddy little place is the primary fact that the Cheltenham Festival is rather different to normal national hunt horseracing.
In what way?
It is fixed.
But it is not that fixed.
In this pontificating posting, we address the full spectrum of corruption that has blighted British horseracing for decades now, we explore how such illicit machinations vary with circumstance and we conclude by demonstrating the very clear conjunctions between Rigged Racing, Fixed Football and Fake Financial.
We will start our nauseous narrative with that bastion of bold Britannia, the BBC.
We listen to our national broadcaster.
We trust them.
Even when they refused to allow a humanitarian appeal to be shown for the victims of the genocide in the Gaza Panopticon, we trusted that there were very British reasons why this must be so.
We acquiesced.
Because we trust them extensively, we base our lives on the BBC output.
The BBC tells us to "do something funny for money on Rednose Day".
So, we go out in fancy dress and trash a bank :)
The BBC tells us that it is going to "drastically reduce" the amount of horseracing shown on its channels from 2010.
So, we explore why this is so.
But, it must be a very serious thing because Victor Chandler has chosen to speak in public #######################################################################
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But Victor is blinkering himself to the Realities here.
Horseracing is no longer a prime time sport for several reasons.
Firstly, it is not a sport. It is animal abuse to the tune of insider trading.
Secondly, the markets are entirely rigged as we demonstrate below.
Thirdly, nobody believes in the integrity of the sport.
Fourthly, the people who attend race meetings are sidelined in some evolutionary shunting yard of neohyperreality. They meet up in Chepstow and Ludlow and Bangor-on-Dee, and they give prizes to each other.
Oh! How the British love their prizes.
As an aside, notice how many of the top bankers under Commons duress are lorded and knighted? I mean, like, if Allen Stanford and Ian Botham are knights of the realm, there has to be posthumous hope for Dr Harold Shipman here...
As regular readers will understand as I have banged on about it before, I studied at the ################################################################### (#####) in the mid-nineties. My unpublished thesis was sold as a high level consultancy document and was entitled "The Impact of Conspicuous Money on Outcome in British Horserace Betting Markets".
In plain English, for the plain people of England - how races are rigged in relation to the betting markets.
And rigged they are...
Horseracing altered with the establishment of the spread betting firms.
Historically, punters had only been able to bet on an animal rather than against it - this latter market neoreality was only available to the bookmakers who short-sold horses as a matter of course.
When analysts were also able to oppose a creature in the market, the psychopathic control in the possession of the bookies was significantly diluted.
It was at this point where we undertook our research.
Our results were shocking.
There was a statistically significant link between the liabilities for certain aspects of the betting industry on a particular horse winning and the probability of such a victory coming to fruition.
The greater the liabilities of the layers...
... the less likely the animal was to win the event.
This infrastructure was applicable for the vast majority of horserace meetings.
As with all economic abuses, think investment bankers, the corruption was based on a hyperreality of skewed incentives.
Imagine it is 1995 and you are at Catterick races awaiting the 3:15 race. The prize money is £3,400 to win the sporting farce.
The betting market is liquid to £1 million nationally and a major firm of market-manipulating bookmakers have marked liabilities on the odds-on favourite coming home first.
The bookmakers endeavour to alter your neorealities a further phase of the image away from the sport's genesis as the hunt. The owner(s), the trainer and other 'connections' are not a problem.
They understand their sport.
The jockeys do as they are told.
Briefly we should explore the obvious benefits to the insiders of the skewed incentive template.
The bookmakers rake in the cash as the favourite gets turned over. They take a market position against the favourite late in the market in order to optimise their returns.
The owners and connections also short-sell the existentially-abused mass of muscle. Additionally, as the horse is still, in Reality, a good thing, the market price will lengthen for the next outing as mug punters follow the formbook (the route, par excellence, to financial ruin). The connections buy into the animal late in the market so as not to tilt the hyperreality. The horse romps home.
It should be noted that the bookies also gain from this follow up event as punters no longer trust the horse after it pulled up lame when ahead at Catterick.
The jockeys have no say in the matter - they focus on deferred gratification and the McMansion.
Of course, there have to be losers in this rigged pyramid scheme of a sport.
And these would be the legions who are addicted to getting fleeced by the market underworld.
It has to be worthy of mention that, just like the fixing of football and finance, the insiders and their immediate contacts are the ones who benefit the most from the inflation of this Ponzi neoreality.
There are, in effect, three strata to British horseracing. Events like the Catterick race faked up for your delectation above are the bread-and-vegan margarine of the betting industry's balance sheets. The BBC/Channel 4 televised races would form a second layer and the major prize money/kudos events would entail the top tier.
Victor Chandler and his ilk are terrified about the impact of the BBC pulling the majority of their racing coverage as it will lead to a massive reduction in turnover on these races.
These middle-tiered races contribute massively to the bookies coffers.
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"This is a terrible thing for horseracing" bleats Chandler in his petition to the BBC.
In that Chandler has been one of the leading rails operators around British racecourses for the last half a century, this is rather selective vision.
Horseracing used to be a mass spectator sport before the bookmakers, including Chandler, took control.
The rails bookmakers alongside the major off-course firms dominate the market infrastructure.
The rails layers will accept bets up to any size from their clients.
Having profited handsomely from this destruction of an alleged sport, Chandler evidently doesn't learn. At least not in the public space, for the man trumpeted the integrity of the Premiership as the primary reason why he was re-establishing the Victor Chandler spread betting operation that failed spectacularly in its last incarnation under the tutelage of a lizard with a twitch in his eye.
Integrity!
Doesn't exist.
Like Truth and Justice, she turned her head and ran years ago.
Out of sight.
Chandler - ######################################################################
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The BBC should completely get rid of racing.
It is no longer even a 'sport'.
It is a betting medium.
And it is rigged.
It is anachronism in capital letters.
We'll finish with a couple of spectacles.
Remember when Frankie Dettori rode seven winners in one afternoon at Ascot?
Well, that was a hyperreality.
In frank and open discussions with ####################################### of the ##### and Rodney Brack, chief executive of the British Horserace Betting Levy Board, I covered the neorealities behind that spectacle of corruption.
Gary Wiltshire was a pain in the neck to the major bookmakers.
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On that fateful day, Wiltshire took on the entire market believing that 7-in-a-day was not a feasible thing.
He lost well over a million on a day he described as "difficult".
A further value to the spectacle was the hit that ##################### took on the festival of fun, as they were out of the loop.
Their year end for accounting purposes was the following Monday, September 30th.
Cheltenham represents the other type of spectacle.
Some of the races are truly competitive and the reason that it is such a popular spectacle is that it represents a virtual flashback to a different era when race results were not determined in the trading rooms of the #########################
############### - a now-defunct lobbying group, like the G14(18).
The great spectacle of Cheltenham is, of course, Erin's Isle versus The Former Occupying Power.
And, being horseracing, it is still rigged.
In a delight of an historical flashback, some races are heavily tilted against the invading Emerald Army.
The best piece of betting advice my Co. Cork grandfather ever gave me: "Back the Irish in the meritocratic events. Back the Crown in the Handicaps. On no account back the Crown under any other circumstance."
This has always been a valuable advice...
Due to my Direct Action background in the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), the Hunt Saboteurs and Sea Shepherd, I was not exactly welcome in British horseracing circles once they had undertaken their background checks and the like.
We were attacking their 'sport' from the hunt to the course.
And some of us did amazing things...
X was a member of ######### ALF cell.
He was privileged in the private income department and, considering that this cell was in the north west, he spoke posh.
X infiltrated the biggest local hunt and, using his poshness as his poker face, he became a valuable member of their entourage. We fought with him on hunts.
Then, one night, X made a visit to the kennels.
He had a key, understood the alarm and was not alone.
Every single beagle was found a safe home as the ###################### hunt was forced to become a foot hunt until they could train up some more hounds.
All that in-breeding, all that class, gone...
Now there's something to wish for in 2009.
Horseracing and hunting - neither of these are valid narratives.
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Football Is Fixed - An Instinct For Freedom
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