As the Jim Best case breathes its last after a year of legal debate and as racing’s ruling body admits it has blown a six-figure sum through its failure to provide a demonstrably fair hearing at the first attempt, it is instructive to see the first concern for some people is the penalty given to the trainer. The British Horseracing Authority has lost a significant chunk of the sport’s money by persisting in an avoidable mistake and there are several worrying aspects to the way it has pursued this case, but the main irritant for several observers is that Best has not been immediately put out of business.
This just goes to show what a strong authoritarian streak runs through horse racing, its practitioners and its followers. It also suggests a failure to engage with some of the details revealed over the past eight months that indicate the respect for due process at the BHA is not all that it might be.
Nothing was more disappointing on Thursday than the spectacle of Nick Rust, the BHA’s chief executive, denying that the ruling body had done a pre-hearing deal with the jockey Paul John, and then in the next breath adding: “There was an assurance given … I’m not denying there was an arrangement made.”
This is the kind of sophistry that a regulator must avoid if it wishes to recover the faith of those governed and it comes from a man fairly new to the job, who cannot be blamed for what has gone wrong since much of it predates his arrival and ought therefore to be able to speak frankly.
Rust’s line was that the panel, independent of the BHA, was free to choose a penalty for John and could not be bound by any deal the BHA might strike. That glides over the reality of the deal that was done, that John’s offence would be pursued as a breach of particular rules where the attached penalty is lower than the alternative rules on offer.
But the real mischief is that had the BHA got its way none of us would have any idea that a deal had been done. The relevant email came to light only because the disciplinary panel ordered the protesting BHA to disclose pre-hearing communications with John. “There is nothing relevant to credibility in there whatsoever,” was the BHA line on day one of the first hearing, which proved to be at 180 degrees from the truth.
Rust insisted that the BHA had to continue its pursuit of the case, despite the procedural bumps in the road that left an open question about whether any kind of justice could be achieved. “We had no option,” he said. “These were serious allegations and we needed to put the case on.”
But justice is also owed to the accused and however painful it would have been for the BHA to walk away from the case after the first verdict was quashed through an appearance of bias, that would have been the fairer course. Instead, it persisted in rehearing a case of one man’s word against another, where the only BHA witness was unreliable and had done a secret pre-hearing deal to secure a lenient penalty in exchange for giving evidence against his co-accused. Who can be happy with such a situation?
Had the original four-year ban stood, instead of being reduced to a licence suspension of six months, Best’s career would be all but over. That would be a graver outcome than faces many of those accused in criminal courts each day and yet the BHA merely has to prove its case on the balance of probabilities.
No one would insist on the regulator’s hurdle being raised as high as beyond all reasonable doubt, but there must be scope for insisting on a raised standard of proof in the most serious cases. That might avoid verdicts like the one with Best, where the panel appears to rely on a process of elimination, ruling out a betting motive for John on the basis of no evidence and concluding that the riding instructions must therefore have come from the trainer.
Despite some fears of a lenient sentence, Best has suffered and will continue to suffer through this verdict. Is he guilty? Having heard every scrap of evidence that was presented over a five-day hearing, I can’t say either way and unless you have evidence that has not been disclosed in public, I suggest that you don’t know either.
