• 'A rollicking tale of crooked bookies and nobbled nags'
• Author 'thrilled and delighted' by surprise outcome
Doped: The Real Life Story of the 1960s Racehorse Doping Gang by Jamie Reid, a rollicking tale of crooked bookies and nobbled nags – with a sprinkle of sex and royalty for good measure – is the surprise winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year for 2013.
Reid's story, only the second racing book after Seabiscuit: The True Story of Three Men and a Racehorse in 2001 to win the award, beat the favourites Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong by David Walsh and I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic by Ibrahimovic and his ghostwriter David Lagercrantz.
Reid – a racing punter and columnist at the Financial Times – receives a £25,000 cheque, £2,500 William Hill bet and a day at the races. Appropriately he promised to place his bet on "a nice each-way horse that is talked up by those in the know".
Doped tells the true story of Bill Roper, a bookmaker and gambler who attempted to finance his extravagant lifestyle by doping horses – and how he was brought down after he attempted to nobble a royal horse. It is written like a thriller and it came as little surprise that Reid confirmed that he had already received several approaches for the film rights.
"After tonight we'll have to tell them that they will cost a bit more now," he joked.
Reid admitted that he was "thrilled and delighted to win" – but that it came as a little bit of a shock. "I wanted to tell a good story," he said. "I didn't want it to be a dry and esoteric racing book.
"Unless you go to Cheltenham at March or some of the other big races you don't get those buccaneering characters that you had 50 years ago and I must admit that is very sad because it is part of the flavour of horse racing," he added.
Graham Sharpe, William Hill spokesman and co-founder of the award, said: "Jamie Reid's brilliantly constructed book lures the reader into his masterly recreation of late 50s/early 60s England in which social class counted for far more than workplace competence. Nowhere more so than in the historically class-ridden world of horse racing.
"This background, generously scattered with sex and drugs and royalty, is the setting for a perfectly researched, paced and plotted unravelling of probably the most shocking, cynical, sustained attempt to dope – sometimes fatally – innocent racehorses and endanger jockeys for personal gain."
Reid's book beat a shortlist that also included Ed Hawkins' account of match-fixing in Indian cricket, Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy; A Journey to the Heart of Cricket's Underworld; David Epstein's The Sports Gene; and Daniel James Brown's The Boys In the Boat: An Epic True-Life Journey to the Heart of Hitler's Berlin. All shortlisted authors received £3,000 and a £1,000 bet.
Meanwhile the chairman of the judging panel John Gaustad, the co-creator of the award and founder of the former Sportspages bookshop, said that he was "immensely proud" that the awards had reached their 25th birthday.
"When we started out I never envisaged we'd get this far or the awards would be so successful," he said. "Back then it depressed me that sports books were hidden in a dark corner of bookshops. We set out to raise the profile of sports writing and my God we have."
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