Trodmore - the fixture that never existed
Trodmore – the race meeting that never existed
To a generation brought up on racing thrillers by Dick Francis, who died in 2010, the Turf has always bordered on the edge of criminality. Tales of scurrilous trainers, bent jockeys, mafioso bookmakers and rapacious property developers populate the history of the sport, and now add yesteryear colour where regulation and higher media scrutiny now polices a sport to a higher degree than every other mainstream sport.
It says plenty for how Racing led the way to higher integrity around gambling and horserace betting that the most infamous betting coup in recent history was the Gay Future affair at Cartmel more than 50 years ago in 1974. We’re happy to relay that Hexham has rarely been newsworthy for the wrong reasons, but it’s worth mentioning a tale from 120 years ago that went the whole hog on make-believe.
Never mind the switching of horses, improper instructions to riders, buckets of water fed to horses denied a drink for 48 hours before a race. This is the story of a totally fictitious race meeting.
The year is 1898, a year in which Prestbury Park staged the first meeting at what is now best known simply as Cheltenham. In this late Victorian era, where the rules of Jump racing were less clearly defined than nowadays, fixture organisers had merely to request publication of their cards and results in either or both of The Sporting Life or Sportsman. With a plethora of meetings at every level, by metropolitan racecourses alongside hunt meets, cards were often legion.
The Trodmore meet was announced to the Sportsman with due fanfare for the August bank holiday, with a programme of 6 races, and since the holiday period included dozens of other similar cards, Trodmore was included without a second glance. And by “lucky happenstance”, a reader of the paper announced his intention to attend the fixture, and would be glad to despatch back SPs and winners. The paper took the bait and one more job was off the sub’s desk.
The instigators of this clever fabrication then set about monetizing it through a series of small stakes wagers among bookmakers across London, often tied in with bets at better known fixtures. There’s no record of the amount put down, in part because the plot was rumbled before the full payout had been made, but even by the standards of the era, it was considerable.
But greed as always played its hand in the downfall of the plot. Where it would have been sensible to request publication in both papers, the plotters chose only the one. When the results were published the following day in the Sportsman, the Sporting Life followed suit, but with a typo showing an SP of 5/2 against the Sportsman’s 5/1. A rat was smelt, and police were called in.
Imagine their surprise at not being able to find the Cornish location of Trodmore. Not even Hercule Poirot could have discovered the West Country backwater, bearing in mind it was purely fictitious!
To this day, no-one has claimed responsibility for the fraud, and no arrest has been made. The perpetrators vanished whence they came, and with them, any other creative ideas for improper enrichment via the Turf. Plenty of bookmakers had already paid out, so the fraud was in part successful.
Nowadays of course, we operate in a highly regulated sport, where fixture venues and information is scrutinized, licenced to media organisations, and supported by a back engine of bookmaker pricing, transparent markets and so on. Races themselves are the subject of intense scrutiny from TV cameras and supporting officialdom to protect the interests of gamblers and bookmakers.
But a little fraying of the rules still tends to raise a smile rather than a grimace if it’s at the cost of the bookmaker. So why is it that we enjoy the criminality when it’s not at our own expense?
Methinks there’s still a whiff around the sport that followers find attractive.
Published by Peter McNeile 04/08/2026