Ban whip or racing will be no more
Answer is not to tinker with the rules but stop jockeys using stick if the sport is to survive
The eternal whip debate stormed back into the headlines last week, courtesy of an unexpected source. Charlie Fellowes, a young, intelligent trainer from, importantly, a non-racing background,
Very publicly, Fellowes opined that Thanks Be, his winner at Royal Ascot, should have been disqualified because the jockey, Hayley Turner, used her stick more than the authorised number of times.
To be exact, she hit the horse 11 times, four more than the permitted level. So a conscious infringement of the rules, rather than an accident. But as the rules stand, only the jockey, not the horse, gets penalised.
The logic behind the rule is that it would be unfair on the winning owner to have their successful
horse thrown out for excessive use of the whip. It is also thought it would be upsetting for the punters who would no longer have backed a winner.
But, apparently, nobody has asked the owner of the second horse, or the punters who backed that, how they feel about losing out because their jockey rode within the rules. So one set of rules for the victor, but another for the defeated.
To put Turner’s offence into context, two other winning jockeys committed the same crime at the Royal meeting and in total, 11 jockeys received 41 days of banishment from racetracks for whip offences. So the rules are clearly not much of a deterrent when the stakes are high.
Fellowes is probably more enlightened than most trainers because he was not born into a racing yard and therefore committed to the status quo and everything that “Dad used to do”. He has friends, he says, “who look at the use of the whip and consider it to be cruel”; and he believes that it “would do the sport no harm whatsoever” if the whip was used less.
But even Fellowes cannot quite grasp the nettle that the answer is not to tinker with the rules. It is actually to stop jockeys whipping horses behind the saddle at all. Something that does not happen when the horses are trained at home.
People in racing do not like it when one talks about whipping horses. They feel that it is an inflammatory expression and that “using a whip with reasonable force and frequency” is much more appropriate language. But that is not what those on the outside see.
The financial damage that the whip is causing is not apparent yet. But when the snowflake and millennial generations get control not only of their family purse strings but also the levers of power, horse racing as we know it today will be snuffed out.
But nobody in racing wants to hear this message. Some trainers such as Mark Johnston are committed to having their horses whipped because they think it makes them run faster. And Johnston seems to think it is his right to demand it.
Others want to debate whether it is fair or not to disqualify horses that “benefit” from excessive use. And the bookmakers are adamant that there will be mayhem if winning betting slips become losing ones, and vice versa.
All the while the jockeys argue about whether they can count to seven in the heat of the moment – the permitted number of strikes. They also say they have to remember which country they are in as the rules are different across the globe. This, I suppose, is whilst figuring out whether they give a heck about the penalty anyway.
If they had all been on the Titanic, they would have been arguing about their bar bills after they had struck the iceberg.
But it may not come to future generations to decide whether racing is badly out of step with society or not. There is every chance that our current parliament may say to racing, “OK, we will help you financially with the bookmakers’ Levy reform if you bring your welfare issues up to date.”
So the least that racing must do now is to commission a report that assesses the financial impact that the whip is inflicting on our sport.
What do potential sponsors, occasional racegoers and once-ayear participants really think about it? Does it stop the snowflakes and the millennials from going racing? And if so, do the trainers and jockeys care? Or perhaps nobody actually wants to know the answer to those questions?