For the past 30 years Robin Oakley has taken you through the front door of the horse-racing world and kept you in the best of company. There’s not a chance of me lasting that long, and more often than not when I try to shine a light on the sport’s brilliant mix of heroes, narcissists and geniuses it will be via the back door.
Alex Frost falls firmly into the genius category, so I went to see him in London last week – and I arrived bang out of sorts. My Oura Ring informed me that I had 26 low blood oxygen incidents during the night and my sleep apnea mask is making weird noises. And combining microdosing Mounjaro with getting soaked in the wrong gear at the Countryside Day at Cheltenham had made me ‘a bit off’. Nevertheless, I was looking forward to shooting the breeze with Frost, the smartest entrepreneur in horse racing by a country mile; although he might not be feeling that chipper right now having taken on the Tote, which is part of a sector that Rachel Reeves is going to batter in the Budget.
In addition to his tribulations in the office, Ed Miliband is about to surround Frost’s stud farm with 2,000 acres of solar panels, so I was expecting him to be incredibly depressed and shot to pieces when we met at the Delauney in the Aldwych.
But I was wrong. He looked like a flipping model for greenjuice.com as he floated to our table and ordered a big pot of English Breakfast tea. No bags under his eyes, not a wrinkle on his face, every follicle of hair still where it was when he left school. And his vitamin D levels must be off the charts judging by his skin. I want his body, and his brain for that matter, when I’m reincarnated.
‘Do you know how much Ed Miliband is worth?’ he asked me as we let the tea stew a bit. I don’t know for sure, but a quick internet search suggested many millions. Seems a lot on a minister’s salary.
Frost hasn’t done badly either. He had a successful career in the City, where he was head of sales trading at Merrill Lynch for ten years after he did the same sort of thing for Kleinwort Benson. He looks so young he must have been about seven years old when he started.
After his retirement, he could have sat back and enjoyed breeding children and horses. But no, he raised ‘north of £100 million’ to buy the least aggressive gambling operation in the market (I include the National Lottery in that assessment). The UK Tote pool betting business.
So does he regret it?
I was looking forward to shooting the breeze with Alex Frost, the smartest entrepreneur in horse racing
‘Well things have never been more difficult. I feel like I’m persona non grata in the eyes of the government. I’m trying to turn a company from ticking along nicely to being something bigger and it’s really, really hard. We’re based in Wigan, a Labour heartland, and we employ a lot of people but we just can’t get any engagement with our MP [Lisa Nandy].’
What is almost certainly overlooked by Reeves is that the Tote has a non-adversarial relationship with its customers, promoting the least-addictive form of gambling. And yet affordability checks have driven an estimated 15 per cent of gamblers in this country towards the black market and hampered the Tote’s business.
Rather conveniently, the Gambling Commission is unable to make an estimate of the scale of illegal gambling before the Budget, due to methodological challenges. They will have been more than aware that unhelpful data would not have helped the argument for increasing taxation on any betting shop products. Frost points out that betting on horseracing in Hong Kong is referred to as ‘a six-and-a-half-hour puzzle’. A skilful exercise in examining the data and making selections.
Compare that with mindless online slot and casino games, or purchasing Lottery scratch cards dangled under your nose in convenience stores, and it isn’t hard to appreciate that not all forms of gambling carry the same repetitive risks.
He also describes Gordon Brown’s linking of raising the two child welfare cap with increasing gambling tax as ‘the most intangible thing you could ever imagine… tying one to the other is just a joke’.
But I suspect Frost is a real fighter, even if he sounds utterly exasperated with the government. ‘Our numbers are amazing when we do the World pool [co-mingling pool betting around the world on races in the UK]. It’s going to be 56 fixtures next year, rising to 100 in three years’ time.’
His optimism is, however, very qualified. ‘I’m very bearish, because ultimately, we have very few things we’re good at in this country for export. And one of them is a very healthy, risk-taking culture. When the US deployed wagering across the whole country, they went to UK [bookmaking] companies as partners on every single occasion.’
It’s an interesting observation, given that the bookmakers are his adversaries.
‘We have a very odd attitude in parts of our society,’ Frost mused as we drained our pot of tea. ‘We’re keen on people taking out £250,000 mortgages, which are the biggest bets you could ever have on future interest rates, and yet we [the Tote] are made to question whether someone can afford to have a bet on a race based on their postcode, which is a very inaccurate algorithm. I know which the biggest cause of mental health issues is.’
After we parted company he went off to watch Bristol City with his son, to sing with the fans and to drink cider, while I was going to look for a chemist to replenish my statins and blood pressure pills.
No wonder that he radiates wellbeing and I look like the government’s growth strategy.
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