If you have already read the article about Royal Forest, you will have heard of Gordon Richards already.
Even if you haven’t read that page, you might have heard of him.
Gordon Richards was one of the most successful flat racing jockeys in history, becoming the British Flat Racing Champion Jockey a crazy 26 times, and remains the only jockey ever to be knighted.
He also has the dubious honour of riding two of the shortest priced losers in history.
The aforementioned Royal Forest was the most famous of the two, but Glendower was the first of them.
It was only a two horse race, occurring at Chepstow back in 1947, and obviously, nobody thought the other horse had a hope in hell of winning.
Legend has it that a wealthy punter had instructed his bookmaker to put however much money necessary on Glendower in order to win him £1,000 when the horse crossed the finish line first, clearly seeing it as a straight forward way to get hold of some extra cash.
Well, at the very start of the race something spooked Glendower who whipped around, unseating Richards, and allowing the only other horse in the race to charge on to an easy victory, costing the over confident punter £20,000 – that’s almost a million pounds in today’s money.
Yikes.
There were actually a solid handful of horses who had lost at odds of 1/20 prior to this, so Glendower was in good company:
- Saucebox (Airdrie, 1855)
- Caller Ou (Liverpool, 1864)
- Kilwarlin (Derby, 1886)
- The Sinner (Manchester, 1887)
- Jerry M (Newbury, 1909)
- Bayardo (Goodwood, 1910)
- Prince Palatine (Newmarket, 1912)
In terms of this website though, we will stick to the post war years when writing articles on them.