The preacher in a cowboy hat is trying to tell 75,000 drunken gamblers that Jesus will save their souls.
This is Aintree on Ladies Day.
The first jump race begins in half an hour and as the self-styled “YouTube apostle” Des Pilling patiently squeaks about our Lord dying for our sins, what feels like the entire city of Liverpool accompanied by at least half the population of Ireland streams towards their own version of heaven: the racecourse.
“God loves them, he loves every one of them,” Pilling mutters. “Every drop of Jesus’s blood was shed for them.”
The bustling crowd strides on, vaping.
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Pilling says he has preached to racegoers here for 14 years. Fair enough. Converting someone must be easier after they have squandered a few grand on the horses. Another holy man rattles away on a boombox microphone: “Hell for all eternity.”
British racing is being damned — and not just by cranky preachers. Protesters have always raised the matter of the horses’ welfare but the sport is increasingly under fire for the sinning that people get up to on days such as this.
At the Cheltenham Festival a few weeks ago a new phenomenon was observed. The Daily Telegraph alerted the nation to packs of cocaine-addled young lads dressed in Peaky Blinders clobber souring the atmosphere for everyone else.
On Ladies Day, the day before I Am Maximus won the Grand National, “unpleasantly assertive men” pushed their way to the front of a queue for a helicopter pad during a previous race, the newspaper said. Instead of being an escape from mundane reality, the sport mirrored a fractious, depressing nation. It was another postcard from a country that is falling apart.
The drug louts threaten the centuries-old compact between Britain’s upper and lower orders. It is tweed versus speed. Would it be the same at Aintree?
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The Jockey Club does what it can about drugs. Chocolate labradors pad about, tasting the air, sniffing for drugs. Amnesty bins are planted around the entrance. “Please make use of the courtesy boxes … The world is watching,” pleads a well-spoken voice from a speaker.
Aintree is a younger crowd than at Cheltenham. You do not feel as though you are walking around inside an edition of Horse and Hound. The fashion is big, bold, bright. The hair is bigger. And the tattoos are bigger still. A bald man has a skull inked on his head. Flames waft out of its eye sockets.
Everyone vapes. In the afternoon one bloke punches another. There is a vape in his fist.
I go in search of some Peaky Blinders boys. Will, Scott and Billy are waiting for the third race to start outside the Princess Royal stand. An argument is in progress. Will thinks a horse has died. Billy disagrees. The horse had definitely died in the first race, I tell them.
They look genuinely sad for a second, then talk about their suits. Like every other lad here they nicked their ties from their father. “We love Aintree,” one says, “it’s tradition.”
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They drink sparkling rosé. And pints. Many, many pints. Everyone has their money on Mystical Power. “Norwich colours,” Scott says, pointing at the green and gold rider in the far distance.
The race begins. A controlled, directed hysteria bounces between the crowd and the riders. It’s thunderous. Mystical Power is thunderous. The lads begin to levitate as Mystical Power storms home. They celebrate madly, falling over each other, screaming, grinning.
People drop later in the afternoon. In slow motion, limbs everywhere, pulled earthwards by invisible ropes. Women replace their high heels with flip-flops. A hardy few soldier on.
Aintree is not really about racing. If it was about the turf alone there would not be multiple DJs, a band that appears to specialise in Pitbull covers and a man on stilts wandering around with a drum kit. He starts pounding out the rhythm of Don’t You Want Me by the Human League.
A man with a tuba starts playing too. Soon he is surrounded by women having, quite blatantly, the best time. “Get low,” the man on stilts shouts. They get low. “Lower!” he demands. Thirty people get lower.
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This is a festival first and a sporting event second. Or perhaps it’s something else, a hybrid. Times are hard. Everything is expensive. The country is downbeat. It is not enough to have a flutter on a race. If you go to Cheltenham or Aintree, you go all out. The clothes, the shoes, the tan, the drinks and, yes, sometimes the drugs.
It’s not only racing either. Cocaine is an obvious presence at football, rugby and boxing matches too. England games at major football tournaments, which used to be watched in pubs, are now true big-time events staged in anarchic fan zones around the country.
This is the festivalisation of English sport. The match or the race doesn’t end with a whistle or a finishing line, the party carries on. The Jockey Club has Pete Tong performing Ibiza classics at Haydock Park Racecourse in the summer.
By 5pm the queue for the urinals becomes a queue for the cubicle. Nobody tries to hide what they are doing — if they are they are pretty bad at it. Young lads are not going to drink ten pints any more, especially when they cost £7.20 each.
I walk into a giant aircraft hangar with a dancefloor, which is sponsored by Carling. The music is so loud that you practically taste the notes. People are really battered. A bloke wraps a tie around my neck and starts two-stepping. His wife, Leanne, laughs at him. “I’m so happy to be here,” she says. Her husband winks at her, and starts rambling about wanting to ride a real pony.
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Drugs are everywhere in Britain at the moment. British people take more cocaine than Colombians do, according to the OECD.
Why, in that context, would British sport be any different? The Peaky Blinders lot might not be popular, they are far from perfect, and they won’t have many friends in high places. I suspect their money, hoovered up at events this summer, might make their sins more forgivable.
