Front Runner by Felix Francis Page A

studied the starting prices to see if there was a particularly unusual result, but that line of inquiry wasn’t especially fruitful, not least because such was his following among the punters that all Dave Swinton’s mounts tended to start at much shorter prices than their past form might warrant. Indeed, of the eighteen horses on which Dave had failed to win last week, fourteen had started as favorites or joint favorites.
    I delved further into the archives, looking at the recordings of other races, to compare how his recent mounts had run previously.
    After four hours glued to the screen, I came up with three possibles, although I had my doubts about each of them.
    The first was at Haydock Park the previous Saturday. He’d ridden a horse called Garrick Party to third place in a three-mile chase. There was little or no doubt that, going to and after the last fence, Dave had tried his best to achieve the best possible result, but the damage had already been done by then.
    Garrick Party was a well-known front runner who had won a couple of races before by setting off in front and trying to hold on to a lead all the way to the line. Timeform described him as being “one-paced, with no finishing turn-of-foot.”
    As far as I could tell from the database, Dave had ridden him in three of his previous runs, including one of the victories. On all those occasions, he had set off in front and established a lead, in one case such a lead that at the halfway point in the race he had been a whole fence ahead of the other horses.
    Why, then, at Haydock, had Dave opted to ride a waiting race, holding him up in the pack in a slowly run affair?
    The racetrack stewards on the day had called in both trainer and jockey to explain the running of the horse. According to the notes in the file, the stewards had accepted the explanation offered that the horse had been held back due to a concern that the heavy going would have burned him out too quickly in such a long race if he had been allowed to run so freely in the early stages.
    But the horse had run exactly in that manner, and won, in a three-mile chase at Fontwell Park in September when the ground had been almost waterlogged and the going was described as “bottomless.” And Dave Swinton had ridden it that day too.
    The second possible race had been at Ludlow two days after the one at Haydock. Dave had ridden a horse called Chiltern Line and he had become badly boxed in on the final turn and had been forced to drop back to get around other horses. He had subsequently failed to make up the lost ground, finishing second by half a length.
    The only thing that made it of note was that Dave Swinton was such a good tactician in a race that getting himself badly boxed in was something almost unheard of. If it had been almost anyone else in the saddle, I wouldn’t have looked at it twice.
    Had Dave allowed himself to get boxed in on purpose? But if he’d been determined not to win the race, how could he have been sure that he would be boxed in? Perhaps that was the genius of the man.
    The third race was the one in which he had fallen at the last fence, even though part of me couldn’t understand how anyone, stuntmen aside, would cause a horse to fall on purpose, especially when the fall in question had been such a bad one.
    Dave had been well in front on a horse called Newton Creekin a novice chase, also at Ludlow, when he had asked the horse to shorten and put in an extra stride when coming toward the last fence. The horse had run only once before over fences and was still very green in his jumping. The message for an extra stride got through to him far too late, which then left him perilously close to the fence. Newton Creek did his best to rise but caught the obstacle square across his shoulders, causing Dave Swinton to be ejected forward from the saddle. The horse, meanwhile, completed a spectacular half somersault over the fence before landing heavily on his