Press-room Francophobia is nothing new. Freddie Head, one of the best flat-racing jockeys of the post-war era, was constantly mocked for his supposed inability to adapt to English tracks – most famously when riding Lyphard in the 1972 Derby at Epsom. Roger Mortimer, doyen of the press room, described the effort of horse and jockey to negotiate Tattenham Corner: “It was at this point that Freddie Head, who rides so short that he appears to be standing on the horse's withers, was unable to control Lyphard, who went so wide that he appeared desirous of visiting relatives in Putney.”

More recently, the portly and hirsute Channel 4 racing pundit John McCririck, the pinnacle of whose riding career was sitting astride a mechanical horse on the television show Wogan, maintained a torrent of advice to French jump jockey Adam Kondrat about how he should ride The Fellow in the Cheltenham Gold Cup. Slow to heed McCririck's directions, Kondrat was beaten a short head on the horse in 1991, again beaten a short head in 1992, and finished fourth in 1993. After The Fellow had finally won steeplechasing's most prestigious prize in 1994, the Cheltenham crowd gave McCririck a genial barracking, to which his wholly reasonable response was: “At last he listened to me, and rode the race as I told him he should.”

The French, being French, are considered fair game, but there have been other signs of a shift in the traditionally cosy relationship between press and performer on the racecourses of Britain. On the same day that Jair du Cochet won at Cheltenham, champion jockey Tony McCoy was asked on Channel 4's The Morning Line his view of an opinion voiced by the Evening Standard racing columnist Lydia Hislop, the most trenchant member of the group of female racing writers who, with The Independent's Sue Montgomery in the vanguard, has laid seige to the male bastion of the racecourse press corps in recent years. Hislop had wondered whether Therealbandit, a horse McCoy rode, should run in the Cheltenham Gold Cup later in the spring despite his inexperience. McCoy's contribution to this debate was a graceless: “How many winners has Lydia Hislop ridden?”

The obvious reaction to this asinine line of argument was made a couple of days later in the Racing Post – Britain's only racing daily since the demise of The Sporting Life a few years ago – by James Willoughby, one of the most articulate of the new generation of racing scribes who can rationally discuss issues beyond that of who will win the 3.30 at Market Rasen. To back up his case that “criticism in racing is legitimate without practical experience of riding or training”, Willoughby quoted Dr Johnson: “You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made a bad table, though you cannot make one. It is not your trade to make tables.” (To his credit, Willoughby did not make the cheap point that the only Johnsons known to most racing hacks are jockey Richard, trainer Howard and leading owner David.)

When stories dry up

But there are other factors at play. A jockey's commitment to the owner and trainer of the horse is stronger than any commitment to the press (the owner pays his riding fee, the trainer may provide regular employment) and must not be compromised by inappropriate talk to another party. A jockey who tells a journalist that Cobbler's Spasm didn't win today because he wasn't fully fit, but he'll be spot on for the big race in two weeks' time, will not endear himself to “connections” if they have not already got their money down for that big race and his comments alert everyone else to the value the horse's odds represent. Any self-respecting racing journalist will make the most of such information – “GET ON 25-1 COBBLER'S SPASM” – having, naturally, availed himself of the best price available before passing on his scoop and causing the odds to contract.

Racing hacks are often accused – most volubly by one of their own number, John McCririck – of being supine and not sufficiently robust in pursuing stories which might cast a jockey or trainer in a bad light. There is a personal as well as a professional basis for this: if you get on the wrong side of that jockey or trainer, he is hardly likely to tip you the wink when his horse is expected to win – or, every bit as important, expected not to.

Most racing journalists bet – gossip about the losses some of them have aggregated suggest that inside information is no guarantee of success – but with some honourable exceptions, few have managed to convey the emotional roller-coaster that betting on horses sets in motion. The most honourable exception of all is the late Jeffrey Bernard, whose columns in The Spectator so perfectly chronicled the exquisite joy and pain of the punter. After having a fiver on a 33-1 outsider that won and then survived a stewards' inquiry, Bernard unburdens himself: “You know what really kills me about betting on the horses? You're never happy. I'm not, anyway. I sat there under the trees sipping the last dregs of Bollinger, cursing myself for not having put a tenner on. It was pathetic, really, and got me to thinking that a psychiatrist I know probably hit the nail on the head when he described punting as ‘collecting injustices'.”

Bernard was also responsible for the Colonel Mad column in Private Eye, a scurrilous gossip column about the racing community – few communities are more prey to scurrilous gossip – which can have meant little to most readers but caused great merriment to those in the know.

The appeal of racing across the social spectrum has even sometimes touched a nerve at the New Statesman, though rarely with the same verve with which The Intellectual Side of Horseracing was anatomised in an unsigned piece in that journal back in 1920. “The intellectual betting man,” it declared, “has a position somewhere between the extremes of Calvinism and Epicureanism,” and after quoting a slab of racing form totally incomprehensible to the unversed asked: “Is not a page of Thucydides simpler? Is Persius himself more succinct or obscure?”

These days The Spectator's racing column is by Robin Oakley, former political editor of the BBC and a man whose love of horseracing is longstanding. He too can express eloquently the smarting pain of having missed a winner or having your fancy brought down by a loose horse at the last fence. But you get the impression that he takes much wider emotional satisfaction from the sport than mere betting can provide, and can more easily roll with the punches than ever Bernard could. Alcohol, which is a common but by no means mandatory accompaniment to a day at the races, figures conspicuously less in the Oakley way of viewing the Turf than in the Bernard.

Robin Oakley's day job of political reporting, now for CNN, is of course also a culture of dependency – you won't cut much ice as a political writer if no politician will speak to you, and the political classes need the media as much as the media need the political classes. But the political community is not monolithic in the same way as the racing. In politics, one side will use the press to get at another side, one politician (or, perish the thought, special adviser) will brief against another politician, spin will be spun.

There are other parallels between the two worlds. The racecourse press room is an inner sanctum with access as jealously guarded as the House of Commons press gallery; holders of the annual metal press badge are an enclosed community similar to the Lobby; like the gaggle of political journalists who collect for daily briefings at No. 10, racing journalists hunt in packs – hence the heaving scrum seen on television crowding round the winning jockey or trainer after a big race.

Plenty of long-odds winners

O'Sullevan made his mark by not hunting with the pack and by nurturing the right contacts. When in the early 1950s trainer Keith Piggott asked O'Sullevan if he could give “the boy” – his teenage son – a lift from Lincoln races to Aintree, it was the start of a lifelong friendship between journalist and champion jockey which yielded numerous exclusives for the Express. Brough Scott wrote: “He [O'Sullevan] used to hang away from the pack. A quiet, attentive figure in trilby and short grey-brown overcoat, the eyes inscrutable behind the tinted glasses. Everyone knew the voice, the most famous sound in British racing, but this was Peter O'Sullevan the journalist, the wolf that walked alone.” But times have changed. With the Racing Post nowadays offering a stupefying supply of racing form, statistical data, wellinformed opinion and top-class news reporting, the national dailies are to an extent unnecessary reading for the serious punter.

The Post enjoyed a major coup in 1990 when its correspondent Marcus Armytage (now with The Daily Telegraph) rode Grand National winner Mr Frisk and wrote graphically about the experience in the paper. Not so graphically, though, as John Lawrence – now Lord Oaksey – whose famous description of being caught on the line on Carrickbeg in the 1963 National remains one of the most celebrated pieces of the journalism of any sport. Oaksey was one of the few sporting journalists to have combined the day job of writing – in his case for the Telegraph and Horse and Hound – with competing at the highest level, and his genuine inside knowledge stood him apart when it came to capturing the essence of the sport in mud-spattered prose.

In 1963, having seen his childhood fantasy snatched from his grasp 20 yards from the Aintree winning post, Oaksey weighed in and, still in his colours, ran across the Ormskirk Road to the house from where he had arranged to file his Telegraph copy, press-room facilities at Aintree being particularly primitive, even by the standards of the time. “Three quarters of a mile from home today, the dream of a lifetime seemed to be coming true before my eyes,” he dictated to the copy desk, and it was only 700 words later when he reached: “It was all a marvellous, jumbled dream – a dream that only became a nightmare seconds before the dawn”, that he could go back to the changing room.

Much of the best coverage of racing is by non-specialist sports writers who have a deep love of and proper appreciation for the sport. As with so many other sports, Hugh McIlvanney leads the field: “None of us can ever expect to see the like of that again,” he wrote of the astonishing 31-length victory of the great American horse Secretariat in the 1973 Belmont Stakes, “but let's go on climbing up into the stands, just in case”.

Matthew Engel has had his moments. His account of the non-starting 1993 Grand National struck just the right note of bemusement at the shambles which followed the flagman's failure to raise his flag: “At 3.50pm on Saturday the flagman's duties would have been as obscure as those of a saggermaker's bottom-knocker to 99.9 per cent of the nation; by 4.30 everyone was lucidly expert on his technical failings.”

Some racing journalists have switched speciality. Richard Evans of The Daily Telegraph worked earlier in the political arena, and it shows: his racing columns boast excellent political contacts. Alan Lee was cricket correspondent of The Times before switching to racing, and soon established himself as the best informed and most readable correspondent on any national daily.

Most Racing Post journalists could tell you the likely effect of placing the stalls on the far side for a six-furlong race at Redcar in soft going, or reel off the names of the six horses flukey enough to have beaten Arkle in a steeplechase. But outsiders come at racing fresher and are more inclined to capture the true appeal of the sport – its charm and spectacle as well as the inherent excitement it generates. When in 1990 Bill Bryson experienced Derby Day for the short-lived Sunday Correspondent, he immediately caught the emotion of most first-time visitors to that incomparable occasion: “The Derby is a little like your first experience of sex – hectic, strenuous, memorably pleasant and over before you know it.”

Genuine racing scandal

Another Channel 4 racing presenter, Alastair Down, provides the most entertaining and most biting weekly column in the Post, but has learned that independence of spirit does not come cheap. A few years ago Down suggested in The Sporting Life that jockey Kieren Fallon had not ridden Top Cees vigorously enough in a race at Newmarket, in order to improve the odds for a bigger race to come. The accusation that Fallon and the horse's trainers had thereby cheated was vigorously defended, and the Life was landed with a hefty bill for damages – further proof that writing, as well as race-riding, can be a risky business.

We will do well to remember this as the runners in the Jacques Ricou Changing Places Steeplechase leave the Cheltenham paddock and head for the start. The hacks have stocked up with diuretics to get their poundage down to a feasible riding weight and have perfected their flying dismounts, while in the press room the jockeys are creating word-processor shortcuts for the Cheltenham clichés: the course is the Mecca of steeplechasing; Prestbury Park is a natural amphitheatre; the climb up the final hill is unforgiving, but leads on to glory. The journalists have checked their girths, and the starter is asking them to make a line...