Racing Post: The Last Honest Newspaper in a World Running on Fumes and Long Shots
Racing Post: The Global Glue Holding Together a Planet That’s Already at Full Gallop
By Santiago “Santi” Varga, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker
LONDON—On a rain-lashed Tuesday that looks indistinguishable from every other Tuesday since 2019, the Racing Post lands in betting shops from Galway to Guangzhou with the soft thud of recycled promise. To the uninitiated it’s a pinkish tabloid full of hooves, odds, and optimistic farmers. To the rest of us—those who treat geopolitics like a steeplechase with higher fatalities—it’s the last honest newspaper on earth. While your local broadsheet agonises over “democratic backsliding,” the Post cuts to the chase: Horse A will outrun Horse B or it won’t. Refreshingly binary in a world that can’t even decide what a woman is.
The paper’s genius is its portability. Fold it once and it slides into the breast pocket of a Manila taxi driver who moonlights as a clandestine bookmaker; roll it tighter and it becomes the conversation starter between Bangladeshi dockworkers on a tea break in Chittagong. At the Singapore Turf Club—where entry requires a collared shirt and the national pastime is pretending gambling isn’t gambling—executives scan the Post’s digital edition on two phones, the second one registered in the wife’s maiden name, naturally. The same XML feed that blesses a plumber in Wexford with “good going, soft in places” pings a syndicate in Nairobi running a side hustle on Equitel mobile money. Imperialism may be out of fashion, but a 33-1 outsider in the 3:20 at Wolverhampton still colonises imaginations across time zones.
To grasp the international stakes, consider the supply chain. Australian breeders ship yearlings to Dubai like Apple ships iPhones, except the cargo whinnies and occasionally dies of jet lag. Those horses are insured in London, syndicated in Hong Kong, trained in Newmarket, and injected with vitamins from a lab outside Basel that also manufactures anti-wrinkle cream for oligarchs’ wives. A single race therefore props up veterinarians in Kentucky, hay farmers in Argentina, and crypto bros in Malta laundering stake money through NFTs of the winning post. If the global economy is a sick mare, the Racing Post is the sugar cube it nibbles before the glue factory.
Meanwhile, governments oscillate between moral panic and fiscal opportunism. Brazil’s congress—never knowingly under-bribed—recently legalised fixed-odds betting to “combat illegal operators,” a phrase here meaning “redirect bribes into official coffers.” Kenya’s treasury slapped a 20 percent excise on every wager, a move marketed as “youth empowerment,” because nothing empowers the young like higher juice on a Pick-6. Even the Taliban, those avatars of austere joy, are reportedly weighing pari-mutuel pools on buzkashi matches, presumably under the theological loophole that horses are haram but goats negotiable.
And yet, for all the satellite uplinks and algorithmic tip sheets, the product remains stubbornly pre-digital. Men—and it is overwhelmingly men—still annotate margins with stubby pencils nicked from the post office. In Tokyo’s off-track parlors, salarymen queue for the communal magnifying glass like pilgrims before a relic. The scene is touching until you remember these same pilgrims have three phones streaming live prices from Mauritius, because diversification is the sincerest form of desperation. Somewhere in the cloud, an AI model trained on 2.8 million past performances suggests a filly named ExistentialDread is “value at 15-2.” The model is not wrong.
Climate change, that other global race we’re losing, has begun to scratch the turf. Drought in South Africa has pushed Cape Town trainers to synthetic tracks that ride like airport tarmacs. France Galop now experiments with night racing to beat the heat, turning the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe into a nocturnal fever dream of floodlit champagne and melting fascinators. The Post dutifully reports “temps en hausse” in the weather boxes, as if the planet itself were shortening its odds on human survival.
Still, hope springs eternal in the parade ring. Tomorrow’s card lists a two-year-old by Galileo out of a mare named Global Warning. She’s drawn stall 1, the rail, the scenic route along the apocalypse. Somewhere a punter in Lagos is mortgaging tomorrow’s lunch on her nose, because if you can’t trust a horse to outrun the end of the world, what can you trust?
The bell rings. Hooves thunder. Civilisation, for the next minute and a half, narrows to a pink blur of silks and sinew. And when the favorite fades like liberal democracy in Hungary, the Racing Post will already be at the printers, rewriting inevitability for the next race, the next continent, the next fool who believes the future can be handicapped.
