Everyone’s a racing expert, at least for a day

IT’S no secret that there are people wandering around racecourses thinking starter’s orders means asking for the soup of the day before the main course.

Rather than shun them, however, the patient people at Cheltenham embrace them and have even supplied them with a glossary of racing terms to help them negotiate the linguistic fences while the horses deal with the hedge things growing in the middle of the running bits.

The phrase book begins with “allowance”, defined as the concession given to compensate for a rider’s inexperience or gender.