Most of the people reading this were probably not even alive back in 1984, but that is when a man named George Rhodes, from Aldershot, broke the record for winning a bet with the longest odds in history.
He placed a 5 pence bet on the ITV7 accumulator that was popular at the time, at astonishing odds of 1,670,759/1 – and won.
It was the longest odds winning bet that had ever been made, and no other bet managed to top it until 2008 when Fred Craggs won his 8-fold at 2,800,000/1.
When asked what he might do with the money, George said:
“Buy a new Rolls Royce – mine is getting on a bit”
For context, the average cost of a new car in 1984 was between £10,000 and £12,000 (estimate using data here), and George’s £86k in 1984 would be worth around £282,000 in today’s money.
Thinking about it, if he already owned a Rolls Royce he probably wasn’t short of a bob or two in the first place.
Given how old this story is, it’s not possible to find the details of Mr Rhodes’ bet such as which horses he backed and at what odds, but the races were run at Redcar and Ascot.
He got in there just in time too, because the ITV7 acca stopped under a year after his big win – although not because of it – when much of the racing started being shown on Channel 4 instead.