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Sands. The demigod of that name, like the imams of certain Islamic sects or like a prophet of the Old Testament whose name I’ve forgotten, has gone into occultation and will one day come again to lead his followers in the ways of righteousness.

7. Miss Valora and Pat Tully
    IN 1958 AND 1959, I gave more of my time to racing than I had given before or have been able to give since. Those were the two years when I was aged nineteen and twenty and a student at a primary teachers’ college. They were also the last years when I lived with my parents and the last years before I began to drink alcohol. I had ample free time. My training course demanded little of me, and I had no girlfriend or social life. My parents didn’t even have a television set. I spent most evenings in my room reading. Occasionally, I tried to write poetry. Early in the week, I read what might be called, for convenience, literature. On Thursday and Friday evenings, after the fields for the Saturday races had been published, I read form guides. On Saturday evenings, after the races had been run, I brooded over the results, trying to learn from my successes and failures.
    The years mentioned were the only years when I tried to pick winners after having taken into account every available bit of information about every horse. In another section of this book, I explain my lifelong interest in so-called systems or betting methods. One of the attractions of that way of betting is that it demands little time, and for most of my life I’ve struggled for the time that I would have liked to devote to racing. On those long evenings in 1958 and 1959, however, in my room in Legon Road, South Oakleigh, I treated every race as a unique event and believed I could predict its outcome if only I weighed up every contributing factor or, at least, every factor that I was aware of.
    During the years mentioned, I was also something of a conspiracy theorist, perhaps too much influenced as a boy by my father’s reports of the doings of the smart men of his acquaintance. I believed in what I later took to calling the paranoid theory of racing. According to this theory, every favoured horse that fails to win has been deliberately prevented from doing so and every outsider that wins, far from surprising its connections, has brought to fruition a detailed plan devised months earlier. As a believer in this theory, I was more likely to select and to back longer-priced horses than favourites. I was also obliged, while watching races, to look out for horses being ridden coldly, as my father would have put it. If, towards the end of a race, my own fancy was on the way to winning, or, more likely, if I could see that my horse had no chance of winning, I would look at the bunch behind the placegetters, hoping to see a horse that was just having a run, which was another euphemism of my father’s.
    I was looking thus behind the leading horses in the last race at Caulfield on a cold afternoon in either late August or early September 1958 when I saw Miss Valora (Red, white quarters and sleeves). My vantage point at Caulfield in those days was the unroofed top deck of the huge red-brick grandstand in the Guineas enclosure. (Both the grandstand and the enclosure have been long since done away with.) From where I stood, I looked down on the horses as they passed the furlong marker, about two hundred metres from the winning post. The rider of Miss Valora, the capable but unfashionable Ian Saunders, had moved the mare to the outside of the field in order to give her a clear run at the leaders, or so it might have appeared to a watcher in the main grandstand near the winning post. Looking downwards, and having a rear view of the horses as they approached the post, I saw that Ian Saunders was making only a token effort to urge his mount forward. He flapped his elbows and bobbed his head, but his legs were motionless and he made no use of his whip. If the stewards had questioned him afterwards, Ian