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2 months ago
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A £50,000 question about what, exactly, constitutes a “use” of the whip was resolved in favour of the connections of Alphonse Le Grande on Thursday, as the horse that won last month’s Cesarewitch Handicap by a nose and was then thrown out by the British Horseracing Authority’s whip review committee three days later was reinstated as the winner following an appeal hearing in London.
Jamie Powell, an apprentice jockey with only a handful of previous rides in Britain, was judged to have used his whip 10 times on Alphonse Le Grande when the case was considered by the WRC on 15 October – four strokes over the limit of six, and therefore triggering automatic disqualification under a strict new regime on use of the whip which was introduced in early 2023.
Powell was also suspended for 28 days, while Manxman, the original runner in the historic handicap at Newmarket on 12 October, was promoted to first place, earning an extra £50,000 in prize money for his connections.
Having considered Powell’s ride in granular detail for around three hours on Thursday, however, an appeal panel decided that the last of Powell’s apparent 10 strokes of the whip had in fact been an inadvertent contact between stick and horse.
That, in turn, meant that while Powell was still significantly over the six-stroke limit, and Alphonse Le Grande had prevailed by just a nose, he was not sufficiently in breach to trigger the ultimate sanction of disqualification.
“We find that his body position was different to the first nine strikes, it seems to us that he was somewhat crouched and off balance to his left and very low in the saddle,” Sarah Crowther KC, the panel’s chair, said.
“It was common ground that as Mr Powell retrieved his whip from that strike on the way back, pulling it back towards his right-hand side and bringing it forward, there was contact. It seemed to us the question for us was whether that contact constituted use of the whip.
“Adopting a pragmatic interpretation of the word ‘use’ in context of the rules as a whole and from our experience … of racing, we find it is not every single contact between a whip and a horse that will amount to a use.
“Specifically on the facts of this case we find the contact was made in circumstances where Mr Powell was retrieving his stick from the wrong side of the horse, and it was effectively an unavoidable contact which could not have had any material impact on the performance of the horse.”
Under the long-standing rules of betting, punters who backed Alphonse Le Grande were paid out on the day and equally, supporters of Manxman also knew their fate, regardless of the WRC decision three days later.
The latter group, though, might well argue that the appeal panel’s insistence that the crucial 10th stroke – or non-stroke, as it turned out – was not performance-enhancing is arguable, given that first and second were separated by just a nose. And they could certainly suggest that Powell’s seventh, eighth and ninth strokes made all the difference, and the rider will still serve a 20-day suspension for that offence.
The latest of the BHA’s many attempts to strengthen the rules around use of the whip, meanwhile, may now require further attention, to ensure that the WRC’s idea of a “use” of the whip is in accord with that of the appeals panel.
Calls to determine whip DQs on the day, however, may now recede. Manxman’s supporters were understandably aggrieved when Alphonse Le Grande was initially thrown out last month, as it seemed that Manxman’s connections would get their win money when the punters who backed him would not.
The fact that it took the appeals panel three hours to decide that, under the current rules, the original result should be reinstated shows the complexity involved. Attempting to get it done on the day would risk the greater embarrassment – and, from a punter’s point of view, the greater injustice – of a disqualified winner being reinstated on appeal.
There is a wider question, though, of whether it is ever a smart move to impose an automatic trigger point for disqualification on what is, quite clearly after Thursday’s result, a subjective count of “uses” of the whip. Unfortunately, once it is there, there is probably no way back.
