The Yellow Sam Coup: Bellewstown's Most Famous Day

The man at the centre of it was Bernard Joseph Curley, known to everyone as Barney. Fermanagh-born, he had lived several lives before 1975: a professional gambler by trade, a former Jesuit seminarian, a one-time showband manager, and in later years a philanthropist. He was patient, meticulous, and comfortable playing a long game against the bookmakers.

His instrument was a horse named Yellow Sam, called after the nickname of Curley's own father. Yellow Sam was a son of Wrekin Rambler, trained on the Curragh by Liam Brennan. On the page he looked thoroughly ordinary. In nine runs across two seasons his best finish had been eighth, and there was a reason for that. Curley had been running him at bigger tracks such as Fairyhouse and Punchestown, and on soft ground that did not suit him. The poor form was not an accident. It was the foundation of the plan.

By running Yellow Sam in conditions that gave him no chance, Curley kept the horse's handicap mark low and his reputation lower. A horse with that profile would be dismissed by the market and returned at long odds. The target Curley chose was a small amateur riders' contest, the Mount Hanover (Amateur Riders') Handicap Hurdle, run over two miles five furlongs at Bellewstown. It was exactly the sort of low-key race that drew little scrutiny.

Bellewstown itself was chosen with as much care as the horse. The track sits on the Hill of Crockafotha, a remote and old-fashioned course even by the standards of the day, and its communications with the outside world were extremely limited. That isolation, which might have counted against the place in any other context, was precisely what Curley needed. A gamble on this scale could only work if the off-course bookmakers were kept in the dark until it was too late to react, and Bellewstown offered a way to arrange exactly that.

The plan therefore had three moving parts. First, the horse, primed over two seasons to start at a big price. Second, a way to get a large amount of money onto him without moving the market beforehand. Third, a method of stopping that money from filtering back to the course and shortening the odds during the crucial minutes before the off. Each part depended on the others. Get any one of them wrong and the whole thing collapsed. The genius of the scheme was how simply the third part was solved, and it came down to a phone box.

To understand why a phone box mattered, you have to picture how betting worked in 1975. Money placed in shops around the country would normally be relayed back to the racecourse, where the on-course market set the starting price. If a horse was being backed heavily off-course, that information reached the track, the on-course bookmakers shortened his odds, and the starting price came tumbling in. For a coup to pay, the starting price had to hold up. That meant the flow of information back to Bellewstown had to be cut.

Bellewstown, by accounts of the day, had effectively two links to the outside world: a single public telephone box, and a private Extel line that supplied racing data to betting shops. The Extel line was put out of use early in the day. That left one line open, the public phone box, and it became the only channel between the track and everyone off it.

About twenty-five minutes before the off, Curley's accomplice Benny O'Hanlon stepped into the box and did not come out. He pretended to be talking to a dying relative in a hospital that did not exist, keeping up the performance while a queue formed behind him and waited, sympathetic and none the wiser. He held the line for roughly half an hour. As the Racing Post described it, "O'Hanlon's occupation of the phone box, cutting an unwitting Bellewstown off from the outside world, meant Yellow Sam was returned at a starting price of 20-1." With the box occupied, no one could ring the course to warn the on-course bookmakers that a flood of money was landing on Yellow Sam.

While O'Hanlon held the line, the money went down. Curley had recruited a network of trusted people who stood in betting shops across Ireland, each holding sealed instructions to be opened only when the call came. According to the Racing Post, "he planned with military precision how his team would back the horse in 300 shops in Ireland, putting their bets on just before the race," placing cash bets of between fifty and three hundred pounds. Curley telephoned around six or seven coordinators about ten minutes before the off, and they in turn rang the others. In all he staked just over fifteen thousand pounds, described as his entire savings at the time.

The timing was everything. The bets landed in the last few minutes, too late for the shops to hedge the money back to the course, and with the only open phone line blocked there was no way for the warning to get through. Yellow Sam went to post at 20/1, the price undisturbed, exactly as Curley had planned.

Yellow Sam, ridden by the amateur Michael Furlong, won the race by two and a half lengths. The contest featured thirteen hurdles, and Curley himself watched from the one place he could be sure of not being recognised, concealed in gorse bushes in the centre of the course, so that no bookmaker would spot him and guess what was afoot.

Because nothing about the coup broke any rule or law, the bookmakers had no choice but to pay. The exact sum is reported a little differently depending on the source, so it is worth being precise about what each says. According to the Racing Post, "the coup won Curley £306,000, which is the equivalent of over £2 million today." Wikipedia frames the same profit as "over IR£300,000 (>€1.7m adjusted for inflation)." Other outlets have put the modern equivalent at around £1.5m or roughly €2.4m, depending on how the inflation is calculated. The headline figure most often quoted is a win of around £300,000, worth somewhere in the region of £2m in today's money, and the honest position is that accounts of the precise sum vary.

Collecting it was its own operation. The bookmakers, per Wikipedia, "did, however, pay out the winnings in single notes, filling 108 bags." Paying in low-denomination notes was a way of making the settlement as slow and awkward as possible, a small act of resistance from an industry that had just been comprehensively beaten. The image of the money leaving the shops in bags of singles has become part of the legend.

The bookmaking world did not let the lesson pass. Following the coup, Irish bookmakers amended their rules to require that any bet over one hundred pounds be placed at least half an hour before the off, closing the window that had made the last-minute plunge possible. In other words, the coup worked so well that it could not be repeated the same way again, which is part of why it is remembered rather than copied. It belongs to a vanished era of cash, phone boxes and slow information, and that is exactly what makes it history rather than a method.

The Yellow Sam coup did not end Barney Curley's story; it opened it out. He reinvested the winnings in horses and in Middleton Park House near Mullingar, and went on to stage further famous gambles, notably in May 2010 and January 2014. He remained a well-known and often controversial figure in racing, as much for his later charitable work as for his punting. He died at his home near Newmarket on 23 May 2021, aged 81.

The coup is documented in Nick Townsend's book The Sure Thing: The Greatest Coup in Horse Racing History, which was shortlisted for Racing Book of the Year at the 2015 British Sports Book Awards. That title captures how the story is usually framed: not as one gamble among many, but as the benchmark against which other coups are measured. The combination of the long preparation, the ordinary-looking horse and the single blocked phone box gives it a completeness that others lack.

For Bellewstown, the day has become a defining part of the track's identity. A course with no great champion to celebrate found something arguably more distinctive: a place in the sport's storytelling. Bellewstown has embraced it rather than shied away. The phone box at the centre of the plan was preserved, a physical relic of the afternoon. In 2005 the track ran a "Seamus Murphy Yellow Sam 30th Anniversary Hurdle," and in 2015 it staged a fortieth-anniversary commemoration attended by both Curley and the winning rider Michael Furlong.

There is a wider point in why the story endures. It is remembered as a piece of history and legend, a moment of nerve and planning that belongs to a specific time and place, not as a template anyone could follow. The rules that made it possible were changed within weeks, and the cash-and-phone-box world it depended on is gone. It sits alongside Bellewstown's 300 years of racing on the hill as the single day that most people, if they know Bellewstown at all, know it for.

If the story leaves you keen on a day at the races, treat betting as entertainment and set your own limits. Support and tools are free at BeGambleAware.org.