Charles Darwin is famous for his theory of evolution via natural selection. Charles Darwin is also the name of a horse.
On June 19, the latter Charles Darwin, the Aidan O'Brien-trained son of another horse (delightfully) named No Nay Never, won the Norfolk Stakes at Royal Ascot, which many expected him to do.
HE’S A NATURAL! CHARLES DARWIN WINS THE NORFOLK STAKES! #ROYALASCOT pic.twitter.com/xecOvsO6E9
— At The Races (@AtTheRaces) June 19, 2025
We know this because, when the gates opened, the odds of Charles Darwin winning the Norfolk were around 8/13, or -163 in our North American parlance.
In other words, he was a solid favorite.
However, users of bet365 in the United Kingdom were offered something special, a “super boost” that priced Charles Darwin at +150 (or better, depending on when you got it) to win the race.
So, if you bet $1 on Charles Darwin to win using the boost (and some on social media complained this was all they could do), you’d have a total payout of $2.50 for the victory.
This was much more attractive than the shorter, -163 price, which was based on Charles Darwin’s odds in the parimutuel system of betting wherein all wagers are pooled together.
As a result, the odds remain in flux until the race begins, and if you’d have bet Charles Darwin at a longer price earlier in the day (he opened in the neighborhood of +140), you’d be stuck with a payout of $1.61 for his victory.
Put differently, you’d have won almost a dollar more with the super boost price than the parimutuel one. It was a significant difference.
Charles Darwin gets the job done with ease at Ascot.
— bet365 (@bet365) June 19, 2025
Super Boost paid out! pic.twitter.com/Ok6IunXMil
Now, with most bet365 super boosts, there is a limit to their generosity. You can only bet so much on them.
Charles Darwin could have also lost. It happens.
But, in the end, you could have got some great odds on a great horse and had a little bit more money in your pocket with which to bet the rest of the Ascot meet.
That’s good business and, for those who took advantage, relatively good fun. After all, they won, and their accounts were just a little more flush with funds that could be used on more horses, or, perhaps, another sport.
Boost-less mobile
But I, sitting here on this continent of North America, could only sit with my nose pressed against the glass, fogging up the window with jealous breath.
This is because there was no super boost for me on bet365. Only the parimutuel price, which I did not bet, because, c’mon, you’ll go broke betting favorites.
So, how was bet365 able to superbly boost the odds for Charles Darwin in the U.K. yet not offer me the same in Canada?
The answer is that the U.K. has legal fixed-odds wagering on horse racing, which means legal online sports betting sites can offer gimmicks like a super boost on an apparently sure thing.
Canada has not legalized fixed-odds betting on horse racing. Nor has most of the U.S., as only a few states have authorized such wagering, most recently Louisiana and West Virginia.
That leaves North America as a land of mostly parimutuel wagering on horse racing, despite an explosion of fixed-odds betting on every other sport.
The math isn't mathing
Some stats: In April, Americans wagered more than $12.4 billion with sportsbooks, up 8.9% from the same month a year earlier.
Meanwhile, approximately $11.3 billion was bet on U.S. Thoroughbred races in the entirety of 2024, down 3.35% from 2023.
So, one arrow is pointing up, the other pointing down. And yet, at the end of the day, we’re talking about the same thing, aren’t we? Gambling on sports.
Here’s where you’re probably thinking I’m about to say fixed-odds wagering will be the silver bullet that reverses the declines in betting on horse racing. Well, I don’t know if I can actually do that.
In fact, the British Horseracing Authority reported in May that first-quarter handle was down by 9% compared to the same three months of 2024.
However, it’s not all bad, and it's not the exact same situation as what's happening in North America. The BHA’s director of racing, Richard Wayman, even pointed out that average turnover for so-called “premier” races was stable.
“This suggests changes in the profile of customers betting on racing with some of the larger higher-staking customers either betting less or moving to unlicensed operators where they can avoid the [affordability] checks that are routinely required within the regulated markets,” Wayman wrote. “More encouragingly, we are seeing growth in the number of recreational punters betting on racing. Such customers are more likely to focus on our higher profile fixtures and races, albeit their activity does not make up for the loss of the larger-staking bettors.”
The latter half of the above paragraph is the sort of thing I’ve heard discussed by U.S. racing people at various conferences for the past four years. In short, let’s get these football-loving, casual sports bettors making more horse bets.
And, in the U.K., that’s apparently happening, albeit while losing some whales to the friction that’s supposed to be there in a regulated market (we can debate the effectiveness or practicality of that friction, but let’s not right now, I’m trying to make a point).
If you hype it, they might come
Let’s go back to that concept of “premier” racing for a second.
In 2024, the U.K. racing industry embarked on a grand effort of “premierisation,” summed up by the BHA’s Wayman in February as “all about making the most of our biggest fixtures” — race meetings — “to grow interest in racing, ultimately at all levels.”
“More specifically,” Wayman added, “this involved creating a tiered fixture list to help fans identify our headline events, investing in the prize money and boosting the quality at Premier racedays, reducing some of the congestion in the fixture list around those major meetings and differentiating the experience for customers at these elite meetings compared with the rest of the fixture list.”
Now, in North America, we have something like this. We call it the Triple Crown: the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes.
You could also argue the Breeders’ Cup fits the bill, although I have doubts the more casual of bettors would know or care much about those races.
But that’s it, really. Three big races and several very important yet not as well-known races. They are all doing relatively well, especially the Kentucky Derby.
Still, it’s just a few days every year. There’s no yearlong effort to try to attract the attention of bettors like they’re doing in the U.K.
All of this “premier” talk by me is really to point out how hard the U.K. racing industry is working to keep the bettors betting, and that’s in addition to fixed-odds wagering that is easier to grasp for casuals than parimutuel wagering.
“The younger demographic likes that I bet 3/1, it never changes, and I’m going to get 3/1,” said Dennis Drazin, chairman and chief executive of the Monmouth Park racetrack in New Jersey, at the 2024 edition of the SBC Summit North America conference.
As it happens, June 19 at Ascot was a premier raceday in the U.K. Furthermore, Charles Darwin is a two-year-old horse, meaning the biggest races of his life are still ahead of him. The Norfolk that Charles Darwin won is technically a “Group 2” race; there’s still another group to rise to and compete with.
So when you put all of this together, you’ve got an industrywide campaign to spotlight and familiarize bettors with great horses and a fixed-odds super boost on a horse that seems fated to be in that spotlight for some time.
In short, someone give me a Journalism boost
The online sportsbook business is not so different than shopping. If retailers put something in the window, it may catch your eye, and you may buy it. So it was with Charles Darwin and the horse.
More broadly, then, the potential is there to make someone a fan and repeat bettor of a boosted horse, and, from there, who knows where that will take them? Maybe the next “premier” day, they’ll be looking for another boost, or backing and betting on a familiar name.
You could apply that same logic to horse racing in North America. Imagine flipping open FanDuel one day and seeing a boost to the odds of Journalism winning the Breeders' Cup Classic.
Louisiana sportsbooks could soon offer fixed-odds wagering on horse racing, but not everyone loves that idea:https://t.co/Q4aTbDVzhD @Covers
— Geoff Zochodne (@GeoffZochodne) June 12, 2025
The racing industry in the U.K. believed it had to evolve (Charles Darwin!) and it’s trying to do so. The racing industry in North America knows it must do the same, but the going is slow.
If it can, though, such as by further legalization of fixed-odds wagering, there are some really interesting possibilities.
Will fixed odds fix everything? I don’t know.
But can it hurt? Look, I don’t know that for certain either, but I’m inclined to say no.
We’ve got a lot of people betting on a lot of stuff these days using fixed odds. It stands to reason that a similar setup for horse racing would attract some of that betting more easily than parimutuel wagering.
There are also ways to ease concerns about any loss of funding the industry may see if fixed-odds wagering were to cannibalize the parimutuel pools that help finance racing in North America.
For instance, the fixed-odds legislation recently signed into law in Louisiana in June had provisions earmarking funds that bookmakers would collect from such bets for breeding and race purses.
OK, I admit, I have thrown a lot of words at you.
But you could boil my point down to this: I'm a casual, and if I could have bet that Charles Darwin super boost, I would have.
