Bloodline

1

‘They’re off!’

I looked down at the image of the horses on my TV monitor and shielded my eyes from the bright September sunshine. An unremarkable seven-and-a-half-furlong sprint for maiden two-year-olds at Lingfield Park with twelve runners — just another horserace, one of more than fifteen hundred such races I would watch live this year.

But this particular race was to change my life for ever.

The horses broke from the starting stalls in a fairly even line and I glanced down at my handwritten sheet that showed the runners in their draw positions as they faced me almost a mile away.

The seven-and-a-half-furlong start at Lingfield was slightly obscured from the grandstand by some overhanging trees so I leaned closer to the monitor to get a better view.

‘They’re running in the Herald Sunshine Limited Maiden Stakes and Spitfire Boy is the early leader,’ I said, ‘with Steeplejack also showing early pace. Sudoku is next on the rail tracked by Radioactive with Troubleatmill running wide. Postal Vote is next, then High Definition and Low Calorie with Bangkok Flyer on the far outside in the green jacket, followed by Tailplane with the white cap and Routemaster in the orange hoops. The backmarker at this stage is Pink Pashmina, who is struggling and getting a reminder as they pass the six-furlong marker.’

I lifted my eyes from the monitor and looked down towards the horses using my high-power binoculars. At six furlongs I could now see them all clearly as they raced directly towards me, the foreshortening effect of the binoculars making the horses’ heads seem to bob up and down unnaturally.

Races like this, with the horses running headlong down the straight track, nearly always made life difficult for commentators and this one was no exception. The twelve runners had split into two groups with eight horses running close to the nearside rail and the four others making their way right down the middle.

The punters on the grandstands understandably wanted to know which horse was leading but the angle from which I was looking did not make it an easy task to decide.

‘The red jacket of Spitfire Boy leads the larger group on the nearside with Radioactive making a challenge. Troubleatmill and Bangkok Flyer are running neck-and-neck in the middle of the course with half a mile to go.’

I looked intensely at the field as they galloped towards me. It may have stated in the racecard that Bangkok Flyer’s colours were dark green but, silhouetted in the sunshine, they looked very black to me and I didn’t want to confuse them with the navy jacket of Postal Vote.

No, I was sure. It was Bangkok Flyer with his sheepskin noseband and he was living up to his name.

‘Bangkok Flyer, with the sheepskin noseband, now stretching away on the far side. He has opened up a two-length margin over Troubleatmill, who seems not to be staying the distance. And on the nearside Spitfire Boy has finally been caught by Radioactive but here comes Sudoku between horses under Paul James in the white jacket, who has yet to move a muscle.’

I lowered my binoculars and watched the horses unaided.

‘Sudoku now sweeps to the front on the nearside as they pass the furlong pole but he still has the short-priced favourite, Bangkok Flyer, to beat. Sudoku and Bangkok Flyer come together as they move into the closing stages. Sudoku in white and Bangkok Flyer in dark green, it’s a two-horse race.’ The tone of my voice rose higher and higher as the equine nostrils stretched for the finishing line beneath me. ‘Bangkok Flyer and Sudoku stride-for-stride. Sudoku and Bangkok Flyer.’ My pitch reached its crescendo. ‘Sudoku wins from Bangkok Flyer, Low Calorie runs on gamely to be third, Radioactive is fourth, followed by the long-time leader Spitfire Boy, then Routemaster, High Definition, Troubleatmill, Steeplejack, then Tailplane and Postal Vote together, and finally the filly, Pink Pashmina, who has finished a long way last.’

I pushed the button that switched off my microphone.

‘First number ten, Sudoku,’ said the judge over the PA. ‘Second number one, third number four. The fourth horse was number eight. The distances were a neck, and two and a half lengths.’

The PA fell silent.

The race was over. The excitement had come and gone, and the crowd would already be looking forward to the next contest in thirty minutes.

I looked out across the track and felt uneasy.

Something there hadn’t been quite right.

It wasn’t my commentary. I hadn’t confused the horses or called the wrong horse home as the winner — something that every race caller had done at some time in his life. It was the race itself that hadn’t been quite right.

‘Thanks, Mark. Great job,’ said a voice in my headphones. ‘And well done mentioning every horse and thanks for the finish order.’

‘No problem, Derek,’ I said.

Derek was a producer for RacingTV, the satellite broadcaster that was showing the racing live. He would be sitting in the scanner, a large blacked-out truck somewhere behind the racecourse stables with a bank of television images in front of him, one for each of the half a dozen or so cameras, and it was he who decided what pictures the people at home or in the betting shops would see. The TV company didn’t have their own commentator so they took the course commentary — me. But they liked it if all the horses were mentioned at least once and they were pretty insistent on the full finishing order being given. It was fine with twelve runners but not so easy when there were thirty or more, especially in a sprint like this when the whole thing was over in less than a minute and a half.

‘Derek?’ I said, pushing a button on the control box.

‘Go ahead,’ he replied into my ears.

‘Could you make me a DVD of that race? To take home. Every angle.’

‘But she didn’t win.’

‘I still want it,’ I said.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘It’ll be ready.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll collect it after the last.’

‘We’ll still be here.’

There was a click and my headphones went silent once more.

‘But she didn’t win,’ Derek had said.

‘She’ was my sister — my twin sister, to be precise. Clare Shillingford — top jockey with more than six hundred winners to her name.

But that race had not been one of them. She’d just come second by a neck on Bangkok Flyer, and, I thought, it was her riding that hadn’t been right.

I looked at my watch. There were at least twenty minutes before I needed to be back here in the commentary box for the next race so I skipped down the five flights of stairs to ground level and made my way round behind the grandstand to the weighing room.

I put my head through the open doorway of the racecourse broadcast centre, a small room just off the main weighing room that was half-filled with a bank of electronic equipment all down one wall.

‘Afternoon, Jack,’ I said to the back of a man standing there.

‘Hi, Mark,’ said the man, turning round and rubbing his hands on a green sweater that appeared to have more holes in it than wool. ‘Everything all right?’

‘Fine,’ I replied.

Jack Laver was the technician for the on-course broadcasting service that relayed the closed-circuit pictures to the many television sets all around the racecourse, including the monitor in the commentary box. His dress sense might have been suspect but he was an absolute wizard with electronics.

‘Fancy a cuppa?’ he asked.

‘Love one,’ I said and he disappeared into an alcove, re-emerging with two white plastic beakers of steaming brown liquid.

‘Sugar?’

‘No thanks,’ I said, taking one of the beakers.

Weighing-room tea would never have won any prizes for its taste, but it was hot and wet, and both were good for my voice. A race caller with a sore throat, or — worse — laryngitis, was no good for anything. Peter Bromley, the legendary BBC commentator, always carried with him a bottle of his special balm — a secret home-made concoction containing honey and whisky. He would take a small swig before every race to lubricate the throat.

I was never as organized as that, but I did like to have a bottle of water always close to hand. And tea was a bonus.

‘Jack, can you show me a replay of that last race? Just the last couple of furlongs will do.’

‘Sure,’ he said, moving towards the electronics. ‘Did you get something wrong?’ he asked, glancing over his shoulder at me with a huge grin.

‘Get stuffed,’ I said. ‘And, no, I didn’t.’

‘You’d never admit it, anyway. You bloody commentators, you’re all the same.’

‘Perfect, you mean.’

‘Ha! Don’t make me laugh.’

He fiddled with some of the controls and the previous race appeared on one of the tiny screens on the front of his equipment.

‘Just the last two furlongs, you say?’

‘Yes, please.’

He used a large ball-type mouse to fast-forward the race, the horses moving comically along the track at break-neck speed.

‘There you are,’ said Jack, slowing the runners to a normal pace.

I leaned forward to get a closer look.

I hoped I was wrong. In fact, I wanted desperately to be wrong.

‘Can you show me that again?’ I asked Jack.

He used the ball to rewind the recording to the two-furlong pole.

I watched it once more, and there was no mistake.

I had absolutely no doubt that Clare Shillingford, my twin sister, had just been in contravention of rules (B)58, (B)59 and (D)45 of the Rules of Racing, rules that state, amongst other things, that a rider must ride a horse throughout the race in such a way that he or she can be seen to have made a genuine attempt to obtain from the horse timely, real and substantial efforts to achieve the best possible placing.

Put more simply, Clare had not won the race when she could have done. And, furthermore, I believed she had not won it on purpose.

The next hour passed in somewhat of a blur. Good commentating requires solid concentration to the extent that all other thoughts need to be excluded. No one actually complained about my race calling in the next two races but I knew that I hadn’t been at my best, and Derek made no further appreciative comments into my ears.

I made another trip down to the weighing room between the third and fourth races. Clare had a ride in the fourth and I wanted to have a quick word with her, but it was nothing to do with my unease over her riding of Bangkok Flyer. We had a long-standing arrangement to have dinner together that night and I wanted to confirm the plans.

‘Hi, Clare,’ I called out to her as she exited the weighing room in a set of bright yellow silks with blue stars across her front and back. ‘Are you still on for tonight? I’ve booked a table at Haxted Mill for eight o’clock.’

‘Great,’ she said, smiling up at me as I walked alongside her. ‘But I’m going to see Mum and Dad first, so I’ll meet you there.’

‘Fine,’ I said.

I slowed to a halt and watched her walk away from me and through the small crowd into the parade ring.

I wondered whether I really knew her any more.

We had arrived into this world by Caesarean section just thirty seconds apart, she being born first, as she never failed to remind me.

Our childhoods had been totally intertwined, with us sharing first cots, then bedrooms, schools and finally a rented flat on the outskirts of Edenbridge in Kent when, aged nineteen, we had together summoned the courage to tell our overbearing father that we no longer wanted to live under his roof.

That had been twelve years ago, but our sharing of a flat had lasted barely six months before she had moved out and gone north to Newmarket.

We had both wanted to be jockeys for as long as we could remember and had ridden imaginary races and stirring finishes, first on rocking horses and then on ponies in the paddocks behind our parents’ home in Surrey.

Twins we might be, but we didn’t have all the same genes.

While Clare remained short and slight, I became tall and broad.

She ate heartily and stayed annoyingly thin, while I had starved myself half to death but still grew heavier by the day. While we both became jockeys, we never rode against each other as we had done so often on our ponies. Hers became the life of a featherweight flat-jock at racing’s ‘Headquarters’ in Newmarket, while I rode precisely five times as an amateur over the jumps before my battle with my ever-increasing body mass put paid to that career path.

So, instead, I had rather pretentiously announced my desire to be a racehorse trainer and had moved briefly to Lambourn as an assistant to the assistant at one of the top steeplechase training stables. By this time I was twenty years old but, somehow, my body had still been growing at an age when everyone else’s had stopped. When it finally decided that enough was enough, I stood at six foot two inches in my socks with shoulders to match and, in spite of severe undernourishment, I was too heavy even to ride out with the string.

Riding had been my passion and I had soon discovered that driving a Land Rover up onto the Berkshire Downs each day to watch the horses at work was not what I’d had in mind as my future. I missed the adrenalin rush of riding a thoroughbred racehorse at high speed with the wind and rain stinging my face, and watching others do what I craved for somehow made the agony all the worse.

Strange, then, that I had ended up as a race caller doing just that, but the adrenalin rush was back, in particular on big race days when my audience could be millions.

‘Hello, Mark,’ a voice said behind me. ‘Are you rooted to that spot?’

I recognized the voice and turned round, smiling. ‘Hi, Harry,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking.’

‘Dangerous stuff, thinking.’

As far as I could tell, Harry Jacobs was a man of leisure. Only twice over the years had I asked him what he did for a living and both times he’d replied in the same way. ‘Nothing if I can manage it.’ He was too young to be of retirement age, I estimated him to be in his late fifties, but he would’ve hardly had time for any paid employment as he seemed to spend every day of his life satisfying his passion for racing.

I’d first met him when I’d been an eighteen-year-old budding amateur jockey and he had agreed to me riding one of his horses in my first ever race. I hadn’t expected it to be the beginning of a firm friendship, especially as I’d missed the start, never recovered my position, and finished tailed-off last. But Harry hadn’t appeared to mind and he had slapped me reassuringly on the back. We’d been firm ‘racecourse’ friends ever since, although I’d no idea where he lived and, I suspect, he had no idea where I did either.

‘Fancy a drink?’ he asked.

‘Harry, I would have loved to, but I’m commentating and they’re almost on their way out of the paddock. Some other time.’

‘You workers.’ He laughed. ‘No sense of priority.’

I wondered again where his money came from. He had a sizable string of racehorses, both jumpers and flat, and there was no shortage of readies available for entertaining in private boxes around the country’s racecourses.

I made it back into the commentary box just in time to describe the horses for the fourth race as they emerged out onto the course and made their way to the one-mile start.

‘First going down is Jetstar in the red jacket with the white crossbelts. Next is Superjumbo in the white with a red circle and black cap.’ I looked down at my notes and also at my folded copy of the Racing Post with its diagrams of the jockeys’ silks. ‘Rogerly comes next in the blue and white quarters and hooped cap followed by Scusami, the favourite, in the yellow jacket with the light blue stars and cap.’ I watched Clare cantering Scusami down the course and wondered again what was going on in that head of hers underneath the light blue cap. ‘Lounge Lizard is next in the green and white stripes, with Tournado in the pink with dark green epaulettes and cap completing the line-up for the John Holmes Construction Limited Stakes over a mile, the big race of the day here at Lingfield.’

I clicked off my microphone.

Six runners over a mile on the round track. Easy-peasy.

I pushed a button on my control box and the latest betting odds for the race came up on my monitor.

‘Scusami is still favourite and his price has shortened to five-to-four. Superjumbo is at threes, as is Rogerly; five-to-one for Tournado, sixes Lounge Lizard, with Jetstar the rank outsider at twenty-five-to-one.’

I turned off my mike and switched the monitor to show the horses as they circled at the start.

For a race with a very large field, like the Grand National, I would have spent some time the previous evening studying the colours but, mostly, I learned them in the last few minutes before the off. If I tried absorbing six or seven races’ worth all together I would simply get them confused in my head.

So I learned them race-by-race and probably couldn’t describe them ten minutes after it had finished. I started each race with a clear mind, and describing the silks as the horses cantered to the start was as much part of my learning routine as for the benefit of the racegoers on the grandstands. Now I watched the horses circle on the monitor and put my finger on the image of each animal in turn while saying its name out loud. With more runners I might have gone to see them in the parade ring to give me more time, but with six... piece of cake.

‘Going behind the stalls,’ I told the crowd. ‘Scusami is still favourite at five-to-four, Rogerly now clear second at three-to-one with Superjumbo at seven-to-two; five-to-one bar those.’

I flicked the monitor back to the horses and went on putting my finger on their images and saying aloud each horse’s name.

‘Now loading,’ I said.

Derek spoke into my ear. ‘Mark, coming to you in five seconds. Four. Three. Two...’ He counted down to zero while I described the horses as they were being loaded into the starting stalls. As he reached zero, I paused fractionally so that I wasn’t actually speaking as the satellite viewers came online.

‘Just two to go now,’ I said. I briefly flicked back to the odds on my monitor. ‘Scusami is still favourite but has drifted slightly to six-to-four, with Rogerly still at threes. Just Superjumbo now still to be loaded.’

I took a small sip of water from my bottle.

‘Right, they’re all in. Ready. They’re off!’

Easy-peasy, indeed. Even my grandmother could have called this race.

Scusami jumped out of the stalls first and, as an established front runner, he never relinquished the position. He was only briefly challenged in the home straight by Superjumbo but, when Clare asked him for a response, it was instant and dramatic. She only once raised her whip, mostly riding the horse out with hands and heels to a comfortable three-length victory with the others trailing past the winning post in line astern.

‘I’ll make you a copy of that one too,’ said Derek into my ears. ‘What a great horse. Must be a good bet for the Guineas.’

‘The opposition may have made him look better than he really is,’ I replied. But I did agree with Derek. Perhaps I’d make a small investment in the ante-post market. The 2000 Guineas was not until May and a lot could happen in the next eight months.

Indeed, much would happen in the next eight hours.

Lingfield was my local course and I was home by half past six, even though the last race didn’t start until five twenty-five. And I had remembered to collect the DVD from Derek with the two recordings on it.

I sat on my sofa and played them back over and over.

The difference between a moderate jockey and a great one is all about weight management, and timing. All jockeys stand in their stirrup irons and lean forward, placing their weight over the horse’s shoulders, and all jockeys move their weight back and forth slightly with the horse’s action, but the greats are those who use this movement to bring the most out of their mounts. They dictate to, rather than just follow, the horse beneath them.

Riding a finish with ‘hands and heels’ has far more to do with the positioning of weight than anything actually done to the horse with the hands or the heels. Most jockeys, especially those on the flat, ride far too short to be able to give the animal a decent kick with their heels anyway, and the hands on the reins move back and forth with the horse’s head.

I watched again the recording of Clare riding Scusami to win that afternoon’s fourth race. As Superjumbo came to challenge one furlong out, Clare gave her mount a single smack with her whip down its flank, then she rode out a classical finish, lowering her back and pushing her hands back and forth along the horse’s neck and moving her weight rhythmically to encourage it to lengthen its stride, which it duly did to win easily.

I compared that with her riding of Bangkok Flyer in the first when she was beaten a neck by Sudoku.

In the final furlong she appeared to give the horse three heavy backhander smacks with the whip but the head-on camera showed that these strikes were, in fact, ‘air-shots’, or superficial hits at best, with her hand slowing dramatically before the whip made any contact with the flesh. As on Scusami, she had lowered her back and there had also been plenty of elbow motion, but little of this had actually transmitted to her hands, the elbows going up and down rather than back and forth.

But the most telling thing was what had caused me to question her riding in the first place. Clare’s body movement had been all wrong. Instead of encouraging the horse to lengthen its stride as she had done on Scusami, her actions had had the opposite effect. It was like in a car engine, if the combustion in the cylinder occurred when the piston was moving up not down, the effect would be to slow the engine rather than to speed it up.

So it had been with Clare’s riding, and hence Bangkok Flyer had been easily caught and passed by Sudoku.

But she had been very clever. It was a real art to make it appear that she was riding out a finish for all she was worth while actually doing the opposite.

Indeed, the only reason I had been suspicious was because of a game we had loved to play when riding our ponies as kids.

The ‘Race Fixing Game’ we had called it — pulling up our ponies to a halt while looking like we were riding a tight finish. We had practised for days and days so that even our aged great-uncle couldn’t tell what we were doing, and he’d been a regular steward for decades at racecourses all over the country.

There had been no enquiry, so the Lingfield stewards obviously hadn’t spotted it, and the racing press clearly hadn’t noticed anything either, as there had been no difficult questions asked of me by the journalists in the press room when I’d visited there after the fifth race.

But I could see only too clearly that Clare had definitely been playing the Race Fixing Game on Bangkok Flyer.