OWNING UP

Nick Townsend celebrates Rupert's charity winner that keeps on giving

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How many racing enthusiasts would relish the prospect of being an owner for a day: entering the parade ring, discussing tactics with the jockey and trainer and, maybe, just maybe, celebrating a victory with a glass of champagne.

And much more.

That is now a reality at a price most can afford following the establishment of the Sport4Causes scheme, the brainchild of the enterprising Rupert Fowler.

In his travels as a racing syndicate manager, and the man who also created and ran the British Racing Club, he realised just how many racecourse owners' badges went unused and conceived a novel idea to use them to the benefit of avid racing followers and charity.

Fowler had been, for many years, the owner of a pub company in London but after he sold up moved to a village near Andover.

Here, he bought three pubs.

Coincidentally or should that be fortuitously? - one was close to where Emma Lavelle trained before she moved her base near to Marlborough.

"I knocked on her door to get her to bring her business to the pub and she started bringing her owners and staff for lunch," he explains. "I obviously got conned into buying a racehorse! We ended up with lots of horses, and I used to syndicate them to my mates and customers in my pubs, and they ended up winning. If they win, you buy more, don't you?" He adds: "I ended up with about seven with Emma, one with Richard Hannon, one with Ralph Beckett.

Every horse I've had with Emma has been a multiple winner. It's a bit of a drug. Fox Appeal would be our highest-rated and ran at Cheltenham.

He was amazing, a tiger of a horse.

I bought one recently that could be best of the lot, called Modern Man (an Irish point winner, who was third recently at Chepstow). We really like him." Fowler also started a racing club.