Winning Post - Letter Of The Week Archive

I note that Racing Australia has officially given up. From October 1, protests on the basis of breaches of the whip rules will not be allowed.
The rationale for this gutless change is laughable.
“Determining a protest for an alleged breach was largely subjective with any objective component not readily achievable,” read RA’s statement.
Seriously?
What protest result does not involve a subjective judgment by the stewards’ panel?
When a horse gets bumped at the 200 metres, do the stipes get out an abacus, set square and protractor to work out how much ground it lost?
If anything, coming up with an objective assessment of the advantage gained by breaching the whip rule is much easier.
Winning margins these days are expressed not only as short heads, long necks and so on, but in lengths, down to two decimal points (i.e. one-100th of a length).
Meanwhile, a certain number of strikes are allowed at certain stages of a race.
Racing Australia could simply arrive at a figure, expressed in hundredths of a length, for each whip strike above the maximum.
Deduct that figure from the official margin, and hey presto. Horse gets relegated, or doesn’t.
“The removal of the whip protest rule will not diminish any whip use deterrent effect having regard to the severe penalties that stewards can impose for flagrant and significant breaches of the whip rules,” says RA.
Right. And yet jockeys continue to breach the rules, deterrent or no.
It comes down to fairness. What good does it do the owners (or backers) of a horse that gets beaten by a jockey who’s breached the whip rule (effectively, cheated) if that jockey loses their entire percentage or gets rubbed out for a year? Money still gone.
Take the Everest. The difference between first and second prize for the owners and slot-holders is $4.1 million, less $615,000 for the trainer and jockey, so $3,485,000.
The winning jockey’s percentage is $350,000. You could fine the jockey double that, and you don’t reckon the owners would cover it?
The reason jockeys keep breaking this rule (to the detriment of racing’s social licence) is that stewards never take races off them — and now they never will.
Introduce a hard-and-fast rule along the lines above, and suddenly you might find jockeys can count after all.