Oh dear. I have a problem.

I've been catching up on various blogs and so I've had a look, naturally, at Neil Clark's. Anthony Burgess once wrote that he liked to start every day with a Bach fugue. I like to start by mocking the intellectually afflicted, and I find that this is best achieved, on the days he posts, by a look at Clark's site.

Quelle horreur. He writes about Saturday's Dewhurst winner, Teofilo, in glowing terms, and adds that "I certainly won't be opposing Bolger's brilliant colt- or his stablemate Finsceal Beo, so impressive in the Rockfel- in next season's Guineas." This is grim news.

A while ago, I had one of the biggest series of bets in my life on - yes, you've guessed it - both those horses. I backed Teofilo each way at 16/1 for the 2000 Guineas and 12/1 for the Derby, and both of them in an each way double. I then doubled up Teofilo and Finsceal Beo for both Guineas.

If they win (!) then I will win a small - quite large, actually - fortune. But, it seems, Clark - the propagandist for a mass murderer - will also win. Talk about a double-edged sword.

I will have to comfort myself with the knowledge that he will have taken a small price, and will consequently have only small winnings.

Chances are, of course, that neither of us will have any winnings at all. In any case, the flat season is now drawing to a close and we can get on with some proper sport: National Hunt racing. Roll on the Paddy Power meeting at Cheltenham, the real start of the NH season.

I suppose that when you are a fan of a mass murderer, there aren't many opportunities for gloating. But Neil Clark is fully entitled to wallow in the result of my prediction that Visindar would win the Derby. He finished fifth, and the bookie with whom I made my hefty bet is considerably better off.

Last year I placed an ante post each way double on Sir Percy in the Guineas and Derby. If he'd won the Guineas I'd be on a beach somewhere now, but the place part of the bet (plus a small win bet struck last year at 16/1) at least left me in profit.

That said, I didn't remotely fancy him for the Derby after his Guineas run, and the training setback he suffered. So apologies for not tipping a horse I didn't fancy, if you know what I mean. I hope anyone who took my advice to back Visindar (who, by the way, was covered in spots and didn't appear to run to his best) also took it in March and backed War of Attrition in the Gold Cup, and so is ahead overall.

BTW, I wonder if Neil Clark is as accurate in his citation of sources and quotes as he is in citing remarks made on blogs. He quotes me as writing that Visindar was a "once in a lifetime bet". I didn't. I wrote this:

Visindar, on the other hand, is one of those bets which comes along very rarely in one's lifetime.

Completely wrong and rather humiliating, yes. But not the same as "once in a lifetime". Accuracy appears not to be Clark's strong point.

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A wise punter, who is right more than he is wrong (and who has put me on to a number of terrific bets), tells me that I am labouring under a delusion about Visindar and that O'Brien's Septimus stands a better chance of winning the Derby - and at better odds (5/1).

We will find out on 3rd June.

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If you were told of an investment which would give you a 200% return in a matter of days, you'd invest as much as you could, wouldn't you?

And yet, bizarrely, there are people saying that Visindar, the Derby favourite, is too short at 2/1. They are crazy. Admittedly I speak from the rather smug position of holding a large ante post investment at 15/2. But take it from me, Visindar is as near a certainty as exists in racing. He's at least as much of a certainty as Shergar was all those years ago.

I helped a fair number of you enrich yourselves on War of Attrition in the Gold Cup at 12/1. But he was merely a strong fancy. Visindar, on the other hand, is one of those bets which comes along very rarely in one's lifetime. The last time such a certainty ran it was Dubai Millennium in the Prince of Wales' Stakes at Royal Ascot in 2000. I had by far my biggest ever bet on him, and made a small fortune.

Visindar is the horse who is going to do that again for me. 2/1 against him is not too short - it is giving money away.

And if you want a lively outsider for a place, have a punt on Mick Channon's Championship Point each way at 20/1.

UPDATE: This really is free money: BetFred has a promotional offer that they will double whatever winnings your make from your first bet with them (maximum £100 payout). So I've just stuck £50 on Visindar at 15/8, and will get £250 back when he wins, rather than the normal £150. Sometimes money really does grow on trees.

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Bruce Anderson has a vile, ignorant piece in today's Times on the Grand National:

In order for the race to retain its glory and its terror, it is important that a horse should be killed most years and a jockey every ten years or so.

What a fatuous, misleading, misinformed, and deeply offensive sentence.

I have no idea if Mr Anderson has any interest in racing or not, but I find it impossible to believe that he has ever spoken to anyone who has, given how wrong he is, and how sickened those of us for whom horse racing is the ultimate sport are to read such oafish drivel.

I used to think when I heard owners and trainers say before a race that all they cared about was that their horse came back sound, that they were only telling half the story, and that above all they wanted to win. I have now owned three horses. Every time they have run, my only thought has indeed been to hope that they do themselves justice and come back unhurt.

Moreover, it is not just owners who think like that. I have never met a single horse racing enthusiast for whom the idea of an injury to a horse, even one with which they have no connection other than watching it on television, is anything other than deeply upsetting. The idea that injuries to and deaths of horses - let alone of jockeys, an idea posited by Anderson which is so self-evidently grotesque that it does not deserve to be dignified by a rebuttal - is anything other than a terrible, if unavoidable, by-product, is so deeply ignorant, and so totally misses the whole point of jump racing, that it says far more about Anderson's mind-set than it does about those who watch, or participate in, the Grand National.

If Anderson ever dared to show his face at a race meeting I have no doubt he would be chased off the course. Or, perhaps more appropriately, horse-whipped.

(By the way, this is deeply unoriginal but if Clan Royal jumps the whole course tomorrow, he will win. Have a saver on Innox each way.)

I've not tipped a horse for a good few months, but can't resist one of the bets of the season in the Cambridgeshire today (3.55 at Newmarket).

Gatwick, at 12/1 just cries out to be backed each way. With most bookies paying a qurater of the odds for the first five places this is a serious bet. 3/1 for a place is giving money away. I lumped on a while ago at 18/1, but even at 12/1 this is a great bet.

Everything has come right. The rain will give him his favoured cut. Gatwick needs to be held up, and often can't get the gaps in time (that's what happened last time when he would have won had he been able to get through) but at Newmarket that shouldn't be a problem.

Pile on.

UPDATE: ...or maybe not. He finished sixth. Typical.

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I've had a strong tip (from inside the stable) for Mahmoom in the 5pm at Newmarket today. He's about 6/1.

I merely pass it on to you - although I am going to have a sizeable bet on him.

Here's my own tip: Snow Ridge just has to be backed for the Derby. I backed him ante post last year at 16/1, but after his splendid second place in yesterday's 2000 Guineas, over a trip which was too short, he's now in to 6/1. That has to be taken as, with Frankie Dettori riding him, he's certain to start at shorter odds.

Finally, Spring Dawn is to run again at Worcester on Saturday.

UPDATE: So much for stable information. Glad I put the disclaimer on that tip. Mahmoom's still running...Oh well, tomorrow's another day.

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Lovely story in today's Telegraph about Dave Dick, who won the Grand National on ESB after Devon Loch's mysterious collapse:

He was granted a 'royal pardon' in 1996 when he should have attended the official Royal Ascot lunch celebrating the Queen Mother's 400th winner. "But that was another cock-up. My invitation went to a Dave Dick in Scotland - some hunter bloke or something - and he pitched up instead.

"Sat right next to HM he was. 'Who are you?' says the Queen Mum. 'Dave Dick,' says he. 'Oh, no, you're not,' says she. 'I am,' says he. And, of course, he was Dave Dick. But not the right Dave Dick."

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Tomorrow is a special day for people like me, as someone who loves a bet - and for lots of other people, too. It is Grand National day – the one day of the year when millions of people who otherwise wouldn’t dream of having a bet make their annual trip to the bookies and enjoy the same thrill that I get during the rest of the year.

This year, more people than ever will make that trip, and they’ll stake more than ever. Last year, we gambled £150 million on the outcome. Bookies expect that figure to increase to £170 million tomorrow. And with the FA Cup semi-final on the same day, it’s likely that the total sum gambled will be over £200 million - by far the largest amount ever bet on a single day.

As a country, we’ve changed our attitude to gambling. Until relatively recently, those of us who bet regularly had something of a guilty secret. When I was a kid, I would stand waiting outside the bookies while my dad put his – and my – bets on. One year, I took part in a general knowledge competition for London cub scout packs. The tie-breaker was: where is Mecca? I confidently gave my answer, from my weekly wait outside the very place: Northwood Hills.

The looks on the other parents were telling: what kind of upbringing must I have had, to be subjected to such a thing!

Today, it would provoke nothing but a laugh. The National Lottery changed all that: making the idea of gambling respectable to the middle classes.

But whilst betting may now be a far more widespread passion, it is not a homogeneous affair. There are set types of gamblers who will put their money down tomorrow. Anyone who has worked in a bookies, as have I, can spot them a mile off.

First, and by far the most numerous, are the Once-a-Year punters. They don’t really approve of gambling: it’s not a very sensible thing to do with your hard earned cash. But they’re not puritans, and like to let their hair down once in a while. It doesn’t do any real harm to have a bet on the National, so Dad will go off to the bookies and put his couple of pounds each way on the whole family’s selections.

The way people bet says a lot about the way they lead the rest of their lives. The once-a-year punters are the same in the rest of their life. They're the people of whom you gossip: "She never really gets drunk, and he doesn’t really like to draw attention to himself. But you should have seen them on the dance floor at that wedding!"

The second group are the Eternal Optimists, known to the bookies as Mug Punters. On a normal day, they are the most numerous. They don’t claim to be experts about racing but they like a flutter and they’ve heard from a friend who’s heard from a mate whose boss’s wife sat on the train next to someone whose builder worked for someone who owns a horse which has been ‘laid out’ for the four o’clock at Towcester. So they put a hundred quid on the nose and spend the day counting their expected winnings. The Mug Punter's horse falls at the first. A little learning is a dangerous thing.

They are quite likely to have the same attitude in the rest of their life. Take a bit of a chance here and duck and dive a bit there. They’ll go out for a drink after work, having promised to go straight home, and think they’ll get away with it.

Finally, there are my friends and I: The Experts. We spend hours poring over the form book, working out which horses perform best on firm ground, which on soft, what difference an extra pound or two in weight will make to their running, and whether they are tired or fresh after their last run. We look down with smug superiority on the Once-a-Year brigade, who opt for horses ridden by jockeys they’ve heard of, such as Tony McCoy, or names which take their fancy. What fools! Don’t they know that every time they strike such a bet they are simply contributing to the Bookies’ Benevolent Fund? They can’t hope to compete with the in depth knowledge which I and my fellow obsessives have garnered!

Fat use it is. If we Experts knew as much as we think we do, well…I wouldn’t be writing this. I’d be at Aintree, preparing to see one of my string of racehorses running tomorrow, before taking my helicopter back to my mansion.

The phrase is ‘self-delusion’. We like to think that we can somehow interpret events and turn them to our advantage. But we are, of course, mere mortals. We might know which horse the form book tells us will win, but that doesn’t take account of one vital ingredient: luck. And we are ever so slightly odd: we can be happier sitting alone with our heads buried in yesterday’s results from Musselburgh than chatting with friends.

We’ll see who wins tomorrow. But – I didn’t say this, OK? – the once-a-year punters are just as likely to win as the so-called experts. Take the winner in 1992. That year, the National took place in the middle of a general election campaign, so one horse in the race was heavily backed because of his name: Party Politics. We experts snorted our derision.
He won.

If you like betting on names and co-incidences, how about Red Striker to win? For what it’s worth, my money’s on Clan Royal. But what do I know? I’m only an expert.

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Passing swiftly by the miserable failure of my last speculative tip, here's my latest real tip (and bear in mind that my record so far with them is a 7/1 winner and a 33/1 third - a pretty huge profit).

A strong source close to Barry Hills tells me that the great betting trainer refuses to countenance his Lincoln winner from last year, Pablo, not winning again this year. Since Mr Hills is not one to exaggerate his horses' chances, this is a must bet each way. Best priced 16/1. (Even better, he's trading at 22/1 on Betfair at the moment.)

Go make money.

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I've only got one word:

Wow.

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Here's a speculative bet.

In the past, I've only tipped horses I've been totally confident about. But in today's Coral Cup (4pm), it seems to me that Rosaker is way over priced at 10/1. The only horse to have beaten him all season is the fine stayer Solerina. And far from being laid out for this race, he was due to run in tomorrow's stayers' shampionship until Rhinestone Cowboy changed plans and ran here instead, thus keeping the weights right down for Rosaker.

With only 10 stone 9 pounds, and Paul Carberry on board, he simply has to be backed each way.

UPDATE: I did say it was a speculative bet. Sorry. And I suppose I should have said that I'd backed the winner, Monkerhostin, at 16/1 ante post. Sorry again!

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Well I hope you took my advice and backed Fleet Street at 33/1 each way for the opener at Cheltenham. He ran a stormer for one so inexperienced, and finished third.

I had the biggest bet of my life by far. I think I might retire now.

And there's still the rest of Cheltenham to go!

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For anyone with any interest in horse racing, there is one small mercy in the Kieren Fallon affair. Next week is the Cheltenham Festival – the greatest three days racing on the planet, the highlight of the racing year. The small mercy is this: as a flat race jockey, Fallon has nothing to do with Cheltenham, which is a jump racing festival.

That is about the only comfort from the past few days in which racing has moved from the back to the front pages, for all the wrong reasons. Now, today, comes a fresh set of allegations over the departure from his horse, while in the lead, of Sean Fox.

In the week before Cheltenham, racing should be in the headlines for the magic which will be created next week, as the incomparable Best Mate attempts to win the Gold Cup, the most important race of the calendar, for the third successive year. Instead, the stories have been about alleged corruption, incompetence and skulduggery.

Instead of asking about the horses, the questions have all been variations on one theme: how bent is racing?

I have seen the sport from four different sides: first, working in the Disciplinary Department of the Jockey Club, which enforces and upholds the rules of racing; then as a racing commentator; for a while as the Evening Standard’s racing columnist, the Mug Punter; and now as an owner. It’s clear to me that there is indeed corruption in racing, but that it needs to be kept in proportion.

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that no sport can remain entirely clean once it becomes a vehicle for betting. Bruce Grobbelar, the ex-Liverpool goalkeeper, was accused of throwing football matches; Hansie Cronje, the former South African cricket captain, was as corrupt as they come; the list of fighters who have been thought to have taken a dive is practically endless. As a sport in which betting is so integral a part – racing is in large measure funded by betting – horse racing is especially vulnerable to cheating.

That vulnerability has increased markedly in the past few years with the rise of the betting exchanges, in which sophisticated computer programmes make it possible for punters to bet directly with each other, missing out the bookmaker altogether. And, crucially, punters can bet not just on whether a horse will win, but on whether it will lose. Anyone can offer odds on the websites about a horse, and can make fortunes if the horses they choose to lay (to use the jargon) loses.

Hence the idea that some horses might be ‘stopped’, and the careful scrutiny of betting patterns which look suspicious, which lies behind some of the more lurid accusations against Kieren Fallon. The current trauma began last Tuesday, when Fallon rode an undistinguished horse, Ballinger Ridge, in an undistinguished race, to finish an undistinguished second. Undistinguished, that is, but for one thing: moments before reaching the winning post, Fallon had been a massive ten lengths clear, before easing the horse down and then getting pipped on the line.

Punters who had backed the horse were, with good reason, up in arms. Fallon, clearly, should have won. The jockey apologised, saying he was only human and had made a mistake. But Fallon has been dogged by a reputation as being a character who, at the very least, gets into scrapes. Allegations started flying around that he had deliberately thrown the race, fuelled by a Jockey Club investigation into ‘irregular betting patterns’ on the race.

To anyone who is not speaking through their pocket – who did not lose money on the race – it is obvious, however, that while Fallon might have made a dreadful mistake, he did not deliberately lose the race. If he had wanted to ‘stop’ the horse, he would have been a certifiable idiot to have pushed it into a ten length lead, and then blatantly to stop riding. The real problem is when, very subtly, a jockey never makes any real effort, never puts his horse into a decent position, and never lets it look remotely as though the horse stood a chance of winning. And then the question is almost impossible to answer: deliberate or not?

Whether or not Fallon is as bad an egg as the further allegations made against him at the weekend – that he boasted of his corruption and handed over inside information about his horses – is in some ways irrelevant. Even if Fallon had never been born, racing would, by its very nature, be open to corruption.

But what to some people might be extremely dodgy behaviour is to others perfectly acceptable. Take handicapping, in which horses are given different weights to carry so that, in theory, they all finish together. If a horse is given a high handicap, his chances of winning can be destroyed. So trainers will sometimes run a horse in a race which is quite unsuitable; when the horse runs poorly, the handicapper will then drop his weight, so next time he runs he has a much better chance. When I worked in the Disciplinary Department, that was by far the most common problem with which we had to deal. But one person’s skulduggery is another’s wiliness.

My own horse, Spring Dawn, ran earlier this season over a distance which turned out to be far too long. We didn’t do it deliberately – the trainer thought he might benefit from a longer distance. His handicap fell. Were we cheating? Absolutely not – we wanted more than anything to win. But there is no denying the benefit he had next time out of a reduced weight. And even when such ‘errors’ have been deliberate, half the fun of punting is trying to work that out for yourself, and bet on the horse when it finally runs in the right race.

Racing is never going to be entirely clean. Nor is football. Nor is cricket. It’s fashionable to dismiss image as mattering far less than substance, but it matters. Do people think of cricket as bent? They never used to, but then the evidence of match-fixing emerged. Instead of denying the problem, cricket faced up to it. That is the racing authorities’ challenge. In the past, they’d have denied any problem. Now, at last, they seem to realise that they don’t merely have to take action – they have to be seen to be doing it.

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I hope you all took notice of my references this week to Fondmort in today's Paddy Power Gold Cup at Cheltenham. He's just won - the race was never in any doubt - at 3/1.

A good omen, I hope, for Spring Dawn, who is trained and ridden by the winning team of Nicky Henderson and Mick Fitzgerald. He is, incidentally, likely to run for the first time this season, and in his first novice chase, in 10 days or so.

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