Capturing the genesis of Betfair's big idea.

Byline: Peter Thomas

THE sight of Brian and Ben jostling for position in the new, aspirational future of British racing will surely have given Colin Cameron cause for a chuckle, given his historical wranglings with the pair in his career as journalist and author.

In the days he spent cutting his teeth as a freelance hack on The Sporting Life, the Cambridgeeducated 43-year-old encountered Brian on many a racecourse, yet he always seemed more in his element in the champagne bar than quaffing a pint of bitter with Brian's small group of reactionary friends. In the fullness of time, he's turned out as something of a hybrid - as if Brian had stepped into a genetic teleport and emerged, traditional values intact, still a man of the Turf, but living in north London, wearing Ben's Italian suit and pouring forth on matters of gentlemen's grooming and Cuban cigars.

Cameron is, if you like, Ben, but without all the annoying "cool and edgy" stuff. His work appears in the Financial Times, the New York Times and Esquire. He's written books about Harrods and Ryan Giggs. He's investigated the human cost of the war in Iraq and recently returned from a gruelling two-day expose of the new Avignonesi vin santo vintage.

And now he's completed the toughest assignment of the lot: convincing the book-commissioning (and hopefully book-buying) public that horseracing, or at least one offshoot of it, is a subject worthy of discussion in the broader field of literary ambition.

The idea of Betfair as a subject dovetailed naturally with our man's eclecticism. It was a story about little men with big ideas; about ambition and execution; about gambling in the arenas of sport and big business; about changing the landscape forever and for the better.

"What cemented it in my mind as a good subject was when Betfair sold 23 per cent of its shares for pounds 355 million to a Japanese investment bank of some repute," he says. "That took it from being a story about an internet company claiming to be worth a fortune - like so many Silicon Valley dreamers before them - to genuinely being a company that was worth $3 billion and whose co-founder owned a 330-acre Surrey estate. That made it all seem very real." Thus began the five-year project that became the frenzied tale of "two guys sitting together in a room on a Wimbledon business park, running around like crazy people trying to Sellotape together this great monstrosity they were about to put into the public domain". Or how Andrew 'Bert' Black and Ed Wray turned the idea of a company that could serve the neglected needs of a frustrated betting public into the reality of a being that would change irrevocably the way punting business would be conducted for the foreseeable future.

Cameron tried to combine the book with his other duties - including the arrival of a daughter - but soon realised it wouldn't work. "In my madness, I emailed all my editors to tell them not to expect anything from me for the next three months," he recalls, "and in the meantime the world financial system fell apart and I realised I had just signed my professional suicide note. Luckily, they were all quite receptive when I came back and took the view that it was a worthy excuse." And finally You Bet emerged from the chaos as a tale of revolution that should resonate not only beyond the world of racing but also within it.

"It's not so much a story about betting," says Cameron, "more like the story of the fellow who invented the Fosbury Flop, how one man changed the world of high jumping forever. It's about having an impact beyond the reach of anybody who has gone before and changing methods and practices that have been around for as long as anyone can remember.

"The Betfair story was of interest in every area in which I work. It's incredible how many people in, say, fashion, either knew someone who was an investor in Betfair, were investors themselves, players on Betfair or had an awareness of Betfair.

It shouldn't be that surprising, given that they now have two million customers, but the real success of the company has been in the creation of brand awareness, and I'm sure there's a lesson in there for racing as a whole as it goes about trying to market itself to a broader public, as well as an opportunity to learn from the way Betfair approached and interacted with governments to further its interests.

" The parallels aren't exact, but racing would surely be able to learn something from a company that has gone from nothing to what it is now in just nine years and more or less reinvented the wheel along the way." You Bet: The Betfair Story is available at racingpost. com/ shop priced at pounds 15.99 IN TOMORROW'S RACING POST: Review by Robin Gibson'It's not so much a story about betting, more like the story of the fellow who invented the Fosbury Flop'

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Ed Wray and Andrew Black: the co-founders of Betfair whose creation has been chronicled by Colin Cameron (below)