it was like printing money i thought at the time its too easy this wont last long, they got well stuffed big time it was the easiest racing we could ever bet and win on, they stopped it alrigh some excuses but we all know the real reason and thats why it will never come back seem to remember 3 or 4 runner races most of the time

know all, are you implying all the races were fixed, else surely simple bookmaking would make it profitable for layers.

DG, I see it was the Campbells, can't say I remember them.

Reg Hollinshead trained Suluk.

No freezing cold January day at Southwell was complete without Stuart Holder driving Steve Wynne(5) to the course, and then betting £1,000 to £200 ON Suluk to canter home in the claiming hurdle, which he always did. Well, apart from the afternoon he went lame at 14s ON, of course. Still, he returned a fortnight later to win a seller at 4/6.

Year after year the thing would run up a sequence of half a dozen consecutive wins at long odds on while every other punter on the track was trying to warm up with a cup of tea.

The extraordinary thing was that the horse was an entire too. I don't think anything it went on to sire ever even got placed.

It was so bad that Dale McKeown was the champion jockey!

I used to be around the Brooke Sanders stable ( Double Dutch and Calapez ) she was lethal around Lingfield with Dale riding. Remember being told to back a horse called Big Finish in a 3 or 4 horse race at about 1/10 but do it on the tote (with bookie not pool). Once it won it paid something like 3/1 against as they had bet big stakes on the other 3 horses to manipulate the odds.
All the bookies withheld for a week or so but then had to pay up.

Changed the rules on tote betting after that coup.

From what you have both said above I'm starting to wonder how lame Suluk really was then the day he cost me money. Not very probably, since he was back out again and winning 2 weeks later.

Suluk was lame on the day, he had an abcess on his foot that oozed puss when his shoe was removed in the vets box

Southwell was relatively straight, because it attracted horses from both the North and the South, and thus not as easy to fix. Lingfield, though, where every jockey, trainer, owner and layer knew each other from going to the same track day-in day-out, became just a cesspit by the end. They didn't even bother to hide it. Barrie Wright, the jockey, would be in the bar with the punters cheering home the winners, not caring who was watching. The journalists were quite happy to turn a blind eye too.

You got races like this one:

https://www.racingpost.com/results/393/lingfield-aw/1992-01-14/44026

Three runners, but basically a match, with the Ian Campbell horse odds-on, and Nigel Coleman's mount easy to back. But calamity! The saddle slipped on the Campbell horse the moment the tapes went up. What to do? Ann Stokell's horse (20/1) barely clambered over the first two hurdles, so that one was out of the equation. All the seven-pound claimer on the favourite could do was cling on and hope for the best. Coleman, meanwhile, held his mount up at a respectful distance, and despite the horse pulling its way up to challenge the favourite at the last, did not go past.

I remember watching the race in the Tote Credit office at Folkestone with Eddie Fremantle, who was still working on the Life at the time. Neither of us could believe what we were seeing. Fremantle rang up the Life journalist at Lingfield asking what he was going to do about it. You couldn't just ignore that. Ah well, came the reply, Coleman's mount didn't find as much as expected. Just one of those things, eh?

Now, that may have been the case. But it would have been nice for the hack in question at least to have asked Coleman for his version of events.

This was the race they manipulated the tote so Big Finish paid 3/1 against. The other 4 runners were basically tailed off the whole race.

https://www.racingpost.com/results/393/lingfield-aw/1990-01-17/32967

I had a small share in as runner on it back in the day. Philip Hobbs had a 40 share syndicate, their first horse was Midfielder who was very good but I bought in the next year when we had a real dud called Bold Bostonian. Philip decided on a novice hurdle on the AW as a last resort. Fortunately my next horse there was 25% of Faustino who won 5 races.

I remember that day Hibore - 19 fecking 90!!!

Calapaez - a top-class front-running juvenile hurdler trained by Brooke Sanders, went on to become a tough 3m handicap chaser:

Cracking footage that. Thought it was Bartlett. How different he sounds now. Just look at the crowds.