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Found myself reviewing this for Amazon, so I thought I’d share:
LIKE most racing books these days Gary Wiltshire’s autobiography is slightly unsatisfactory, but only slightly. Gone are the days of classic Turf accounts: Sods I Have Cut by Jack Leach, Fun Was My Living by Quintin Gilbey, Talking Horses by Jeffery Bernard etc.
Today’s racing publications often bear the hallmarks of haste, an under-edited collection of usually only mildly amusing anecdotes strung out and rattled off with an above average amount of errors in the text.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say that about Wiltshire’s memoirs because there is a lot in them which is interesting and amusing, and of course any blame must to a certain extent be put on his ghost writer, Sean Magee (I am assuming that Magee is the ghost writer as he shares copyright credit in the notes).
The book is of course structured around the day in 1996 on which Frankie Dettori rode his ‘Magnificent Seven’ at Ascot, when Wiltshire laid the Italian jockey’s seventh winning ride of the day for about one million pounds. Wiltshire thought the horse could not win. Well, you know what Thought did, don’t you …?
He defends himself on this score, saying that the price Fujiyama Crest was backed into during the furore before the race was quite ridiculous given the horse’s form.
Oddly enough this is by far the least interesting part of the book. Some of the best bits are glimpses we get of a vanished world, when schoolboys read the Sporting Life and Wiltshire’s grandfather, who had the best flower stall in Leather Lane, London, would ‘dress up smart every Monday regular as clockwork’ and go racing at the Alexandra Palace course in North London (how great would it be if that was still going?), and later Wiltshire’s adventures with greyhounds and donkey derbys at the seaside.
Wiltshire takes us from his first forays of making money by selling bacon sandwiches and making a book at school, through ‘lost years’ of gambling addiction and mug punterdom, to selling flowers and general cheapjacking in markets to finally getting his bookie’s licence and that fateful day at Ascot.
Wiltshire describes himself as a cheeky ******* early in the book and some of the anecdotes bear this candid self-assessment out: the highpoints are the sometimes extremely novel wheezes he pulls with friends to get giant bets on, or to con bookmakers into giving him and his friends the prices they want on sporting events.
Long before you reach the part where Wiltshire meets his Waterloo in the ring at Ascot, your hat is off to the man, for his nerve and industry. He gets into many tight spots and simply works his way out of them, which is exactly how he copes with his 1996 disaster.
If you are interested in racing and gambling you will be drawn in to turning the pages rapidly.
However, I was left wondering exactly how Wiltshire went from being a serial loser who lost so much and so often that he tried gamblers’ anonymous, to being a wealthy touch-pulling bookmaker and racehorse owner. How exactly did he get good? We don’t really find out. Similarly, though Wiltshire is admirably frank in his anecdotes of laying out horses for various touches, the undercurrents of criminality and sharp practice in racing are scarcely mentioned.
But his infectious enthusiasm had this reader rather wishing he’d become a bookmaker. Wiltshire says he teaches the art of making a book and directs inquiring minds to his web site address at the end of the book – which as far as I can discover is no longer in existence.
However, you can’t help warming to the man, especially when he signs off with ‘Hope you enjoyed the book’. A sentence that wouldn’t be out of place at the end of books by many more seriously regarded writers. Winning It Back is a worthwhile addition to the bookshelf of any racing addict.
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