Racing's swinging year

For racing, 1960 was a better year than 1998. According to the British Horseracing Board, attendance figures for race meetings in 1960 topped 5,475,876 while those in 1998 barely reached 5 million. In fact, 1960 has the highest attendance of any year and did so with the smallest amount of meetings. There were 722 meetings in swinging 1960 while in 1998 there were 1,137.

1991 came close to the highest attendance figure with 5,008,310 people attending 1,153 fixtures. But what was so good about 1960 except that it signalled the end of the doleful 1950s.

One suggestion has been that betting in non-course shops was introduced after 1960 in England which meant that the thousands of punters who had to beat their way to the course to gamble could do so in the luxury of dark-windowed betting saloons.

Needless to say, prize money in 1998 was higher than ever. Between the flat and the jumps it totalled a record £63,658,000, up 5.7 per cent on 1997.