ThruxBets

Hi,

Welcome to this tiny corner of the internet where I write about the one of the sports I love; horse racing.

This blog is part general musings, part racing ‘analysis’ and part. Here you’ll find my selections, a few angles and stats (god bless HorseRaceBase), the occasional deep dive, and maybe even photos after a day spent at the track.

Between work, life and ferrying my football-mad son around the county for training and matches, I don’t get as much time with the form book as I’d like. So posts may be a little sporadic and irregular, but it will never be for the want of trying.

Subsequently, I’m a relatively small-stakes punter who tries to take the sport seriously while keeping the enjoyment front and centre.

For transparency, for me, 1pt = £5, and I launched this blog with a 200pt starting bank on 1st January, 2026.

You can track how well (or badly) things are going via my up-to-date P/L record.

Just to be clear: I’m not a tipster. I simply love racing and enjoy writing about it. Sharing a few thoughts along the way feels like a fun thing to do – and who knows, I might not be completely terrible at it.

Some background …

I was born within a stones throw of the Knavesmire*, home of York racecourse – one of the country’s finest flat courses.

As a nipper, my dad, and sometimes my grandad would often take me for walks or cycle rides around the vast expanse of green grass and along the miles of seemingly never ending straight white rails.

Once or twice, our trips would coincide with a race day and we would stand near to the old Tyburn – the site of the gallows where Dick Turpin and hundreds of others met their demise at the end of the hangman’s rope – and watch the exhilarating scene of horses and their jockey’s breaking from the stalls, at what I now know to be the 1m6f start.

Despite this early introduction to the world of horse racing, all though my school and college life I never really had more than a passing interest in the sport, and would generally only really pay anything resembling attention on Grand National day or perhaps when the Epsom Derby got a few column inches or a segment on the news (I have a random but vivid memory of my dad and grandad in our living room talking about a horse called Tenby who was running in the Derby – so that was 1993 and I was 12 – but they almost certainly won’t have had a bet and I can’t recall them ever speaking about the sport since)

I left it until the last year of my teens until I struck my very first proper bet on the horses and I can remember it well.

It was in a Ladbrokes shop on Percy Street in Newcastle-upon-Tyne where I was at University (see Google Streetview photo below).

One October afternoon, a friend and I had a bit of time to kill before meeting some friends for some beers to celebrate my 19th birthday, so on our way to the pub, we went into the bookies.

I can’t remember the actual reasons why we went into the shop that day, it wasn’t raining, and my friend wasn’t really a gambler.

I also can’t remember why we decided to both have £5 on Red Guard in the 3.50 at Fontwell, but we did, and Red Guard, trained by Josh Gifford and ridden by Philip Hide …. won by a length at 7/2.

A few pints were bought and the die was cast.

Red Guard had piqued my interest and as the months, years and now decades passed, I started to, slowly but surely, get more and more interested in horse racing, finding myself buying the Racing Post, attending race meetings, reading around the subject and trying to select horses based on more than just nice silks and good names (a tactic though, which nevertheless, seems to work exceptionally well for my wife whenever she comes racing with me).

Which sort of leads me, in a roundabout way, to the here and now, an avid horse racing fan, writing this nonsense on the internet.

It’s now well over two decades ago since Red Guard did the business at Fontwell and I’m still trying to select horses based on more than just nice silks and good names, but as the saying goes;

“Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it.”

*After reading this page back, I realised this sentence could be an alternative opening line to Disco 2000 by Pulp.