BETTING DIVES SALES ROCKET

Rolf Johnson views the numbers and reckons it just does not add up’

- Rolf Johnson

Harefied atmosphere in the Newmarket Sales ring 2024 and the audience caught its breath as bidding for yearlings, foals and mares in training went stratospheric. Buyers were surely under the influence of hypoxia – an irrational sense of wellbeing brought on by lack of oxygen. It’s a condition often experienced climbing Everest or when one’s parachute fails to open. Back to earth for those who splashed out millions, they have the winter months to muse on whether they will still be laughing this time next year, by which time they’ll have a good idea whether they’ve bought ‘Black Friday’ bargains or ‘done their dough’: ‘Black Thursday’, 1929, marked the start of the American Great Depression.

“Spend, spend, spend” promised Vivien Nicholson, most infamous of all Football Pools winners. In 1961 her eight score-draw ticks (crosses) came up on the Littlewoods coupon and she won herself and one of her husbands the equivalent of £4.3m today. Going for broke she’d still have been underbidder for 2024’s choice yearling (more of which to come). Not that Nicholson held back, escaping factory drudgery for the good life on a luxury estate where she observed, with unsuspected perspicacity, her new neighbours. “They push their cars out of the garage on Sunday for a wash and put them back in - til next Sunday.”

Profligate footballers’ women, the ‘WAGS’ - catch them washing their cars - wouldn’t be invented for half a century: Nicholson was their prototype. It couldn’t last. Down on her luck, inevitably, she ended up singing ‘Hey Big Spender’ in a strip show from which she was sacked - she wouldn’t strip naked. Her creditors did that.

For Littlewoods this was publicity money couldn’t buy.