A great deal has changed since allweather racing was inaugurated at Lingfield Park 20 years ago. Emblematic of its metamorphosis were the bright skies under which the course yesterday celebrated that anniversary.

Global warming has made an anachronism of the phrase “all-weather”. The oft-deserted venue even drew a healthy crowd, swollen by children celebrating Hallowe’en and dozens of French students basking in the sun. Just about the only constant between then and now was Frankie Dettori.

A winner on opening day two decades back, Dettori rode a fourtimer for Godolphin to reach 100 seasonal winners for the twelfth time in his career. Back then, Godolphin did not exist. Even if it did, its blue livery would never have graced the novel racecourse with a revolutionary surface designed to defy Arctic conditions.

Gone is the sight of jockeys riding with their breeches over their boots, which would fill with clumps of the oily, rubber-based compound. “That Equitrack surface was a real brute,” Nick Littmoden, the trainer who made his reputation on the winter circuit, said. “The kickback was fierce until they came up with Polytrack in 2002. That’s when all-weather racing took a huge leap forward.”

Yesterday’s card amplified the point. Newmarket would have been proud to host the posse of A-list trainers who sent runners to the Surrey track. Indeed, the code has become almost too popular for its own good, prompting a U-turn in the great all-weather debate. What was initially seen as an act of folly now stands accused of profiting at turf racing’s expense.

Many Jockey Club members laughed when Ron Muddle paid £750,000 for Lingfield with plans to install the artificial surface he first encountered when visiting Miami, in Florida. “They thought I was totally mad,” Muddle recalled yesterday.

“They were very sceptical at the time and didn’t want to know because virtually none of them thought it would work, but I had an ally in [maverick former Tote chairman Lord] Woodrow Wyatt, who said in his book: ‘They don’t like this Muddle because he is a commoner, but I’m certain he will prove them wrong’.”

A restless and driven man, Muddle, now 93, survived the barbs and laughed loudest when he sold Lingfield for £8 million eight years after he bought it, before the first all-weather fixture was staged.

When Muddle replaced turf with dirt at Wolverhampton and reopened it in 1993, the place resembled a desolate lunar landscape. Horses’ hoofprints in the sand were redolent of moon craters. More sand lay in giant piles awaiting dispersal by builders’ shovels across an area resembling Ground Zero. The place looked doomed.

Now, however, Wolverhampton races mostly under floodlights, with beer-fuelled punters walking the short distance to the on-site hotel that will one day house a grand casino. It will soon be a mecca within the deregulated gambling industry.

Although Muddle pioneered allweather racing he admitted to being surprised at its popularity. Throughout its existence it has provoked all manner of reactions in all sorts of people — notably from Lord Hartington, the Queen’s representative at Ascot who was the Jockey Club’s senior steward two decades ago.

Hartington’s address to the 1990 Gimcrack Dinner marked the only time this paragon of gentleness lost his temper in public, lambasting bookmakers for their pitiful financial contribution to the sport when racing had spent tens of millions in funding the all-weather project.

The code has become a boon for high-street betting shops to the extent that an increasingly vociferous faction within racing believes it should operate in future by a financial alliance between racecourses and bookmakers without funding from racing’s central coffers.

Even as the all-weather bandwagon rolled, however, the Jockey Club hesitated to embrace it. The club, the largest racecourse operator in the land, only developed its first all-weather facility at Kempton in 2006. It was slow to recognise that all-weather tracks act as cash dispensers on the bottom lines of company accounts.

It is popular with a breed of punters who love the consistency of its surface. But the real conundrum is the drain it places on racing’s dwindling finances to reward, however pitifully, the syndicate owners of cheap horses that bring participation to the masses.

These owners flock to Lingfield to cheer their horses unashamedly, in the process making barmen rich. It’s as far from the Sport of Kings as it gets. Arena Leisure may have supplanted Muddle as owners of Lingfield, Wolverhampton and Southwell, but the mantra remains the same.

As Mark Elliott, Arena’s chief executive, put it during the twentieth anniversary celebrations at Lingfield yesterday: “Love it, loathe it, respect it or rubbish it, all-weather racing is here to stay.”