For the first time in his 45 years of bookmaking, Anthony Doughty drove to Warrnambool this week with a sense of dread.
The May jumps carnival is famous for history and solidarity. Everything stays the same; grown men behave like teenagers and stagger home alone, no one finds the $81 leg of that $100,000 quaddie and days begin with a “hair of the dog” and a nostalgic wander into the betting ring.
Driving through Geelong, Colac, Camperdown and Terang, Doughty hoped that these expected things would still be there. The betting ring, mostly. The way it’s always been.
The art of on-course bookmaking is in its death throes (as Doughty described) yet Warrnambool has been the stoic aberration.
Not even death could kill it.
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