Missing a Killing

One of the less appealing aspects of the information revolution so far is that everybody's getting rich except you and me. But distressing as it is to see other people turn into millionaires overnight, the really unacceptable thing about the so-called information age is that you can still have events like last weekend, when half the country (not the half we live in) apparently knew Papillon was going to win the English Grand National, and kept it to themselves.

I was at the horse's homecoming in Kill on Sunday night and, needless to say, everyone in the village had been in on the coup. But although Kill is a tight-knit little community, tucked away just off the information super-highway (take a left at a set of traffic lights before Naas), news of Papillon's impending victory seems to have reached far and wide before Saturday's race.

Not quite wide enough, though. We in The Irish Times like to think we have our ears to the ground; but - maybe because of the level of traffic noise in Dublin these days - we somehow missed the stampede into the bookmakers on Friday evening and early Saturday, when the horse's odds were still residing in the leafy southside neighbourhood of 50-1.

By early Saturday afternoon, which was the first I heard of the rumour, he was 10-1 joint favourite, and most market analysts thought he was as overvalued as the Nasdaq index. At that stage, every second punter you met was waving share certificates in papillon.com, and exaggerating about the odds they'd got: "They were this big - honest!" (Even if the horse doesn't win, there's a certain e cachet to being in early on the year's big gamble).

I have my own, highly complex system for picking the winner of the English Grand National. It's a system I've been refining since, in a burst of beginner's luck, Rag Trade turned my 10p win stake into £1.50 in 1976; making me briefly the Bill Gates of my generation (I was a 14-year-old schoolboy, so I looked just like him, too).

This gave rise to one of my cardinal rules for picking Grand National winners: that horses whose names began with R and comprise two syllables will always be hard to beat. With this knowledge, I backed Red Rum in 1977; Rubstic in 1979; and, of course, Rhyme and Reason in 1988. (You're probably thinking there are more than two syllables in Rhyme and Reason, but it depends how you say it. And, ok, this is not a precise science. And, anyway, who backed the winner in 1988 - me or you?)

One of the lesser rules is that non-English-speaking horses will always struggle; useful again this year, in that it excluded one of the novelty bets of the race, the "winner of the Norsk Grand National," Trinitro.

Not only did Trinitro sound like a dubious technology stock but, more to the point, the idea of a Norwegian horse running at Aintree was too much like Eddie the Eagle competing in the Olympic ski-jump. And so it proved, although I took no pleasure in seeing the horse crash out at the very first fence, sending his jockey almost as far through the air as Eddie ever went.

But the first and most important rule for picking the winner of the 'National is: never back a horse that has won the race already (unless the horse is called Red Rum). And the second most important rule is: don't worry about the first rule if you've got a gut feeling. So, on Saturday afternoon, I went in to the bookies to back Bobbyjo for a repeat win, based on what I thought was a strong gut feeling (but was later diagnosed as indigestion).

And while I was in the bookies, studying the board through the haze of dense smoke which is not only the physical environment of all bookmakers' shops but a useful metaphor for the process of trying to pick Grand National winners, I noticed that overnight the odds on Papillon had fallen more dramatically than a continental footballer tackled in the penalty area.

So throwing my rule-book in the bin, I backed Bobbyjo and also had a small, each-way bet on the other horse, based on the niggling thought that somebody, somewhere (probably Kildare) knew something. As a result, I made about £30 on the race; which, when you take into account that punters always exaggerate their winnings, works out at exactly £22.50.

This was little consolation when news of the multi-million pay-out on the winner emerged. And it certainly didn't allow me to feel smug in Kill on Sunday night, where locals set a new Irish record for smugness; beating the old mark established last year by the Meath village of Dunshaughlin, after Bobbyjo landed the gamble of that race.

A clear pattern is now emerging, in which fleecing the bookies is more profitable than tourism for communities in the horse country west of Dublin; and this must be another example of what the Economist meant this week in its lead story on "the knowledge economy". In fact, the magazine was talking about the Microsoft case; celebrating the end of Bill Gates's monopoly and calling for the company to be split up into a number of separate divisions.

I wouldn't go as far yet as to call for the break-up of the Meath-Kildare racing community into a number of separate divisions, at least one of them located in Dublin. But I do think if the information age is to mean anything, it's important that I'm let in on next year's winner well in advance. Before the banks close on the Friday, if possible.

Frank McNally can be contacted at fmcnally@irish-times.ie