After 10 angry months of finger-pointing and procedural irregularities, it is hard to know what a satisfying conclusion to the Jim Best case might have looked like, but the one reached on Monday is not it. There is no closure here, no revelation that all is known at last. Instead, there is bitterness on all sides.
Best has been found in breach of the rules, having always maintained his innocence. But his punishment will be nothing like as severe as the four-year ban set after the first hearing as part of a decision that was struck down in May. The revised six-month suspension is a rebuff to the British Horseracing Authority, which suggested a ban of up to six years here.
Racing’s ruling body can claim to have won the case it has pursued so hotly for almost a full year, but the cost has been significant and not just in the obvious sense of the sport’s money being poured into the pockets of QCs at one hearing after another. “If the BHA had done its work properly, this finding would have been made in April,” said William Norris QC, part of the three-man panel, during a brief clash with the BHA’s barrister, Louis Weston.
The panel landed another blow on the regulator in its published reasons, declaring there was in fact a deal between the BHA and the jockey Paul John, the ruling body having promised to seek a low-level penalty for the jockey in exchange for his evidence against Best. The panel added that John has been treated leniently by the BHA but finally ruled the deal did not do substantial harm to his credibility.
What it will do to the BHA’s credibility is another question, considering the regulator has always denied there was a deal and, at the February hearing, argued it should not have to disclose any communications between it and John’s lawyers. When it was ordered to do so, an email came to light which, the latest panel has found, shows a deal was done.
Such deals are not forbidden but, as this panel notes, correspondence of that kind between the BHA and an accused person “must certainly be disclosed” to any co-accused such as Best. What can have led racing’s ruling body to do a secret deal with one of two accused men and then deny it for months? That turns out to be as big a question as any raised by the Jim Best case.
In a further extraordinary twist, the panel was allowed to leave the building without clarifying exactly what it meant by its order that Best’s licence would be “suspended”. The BHA had sought an outright ban that would prevent him from entering racing stables or from having anything to do with the sport.
Did the panel intend something short of that or was this merely an example of three men serving at their first BHA hearing and using confusing terminology? The day ended with no definitive answer from the ruling body and that point will have to be clarified on Tuesday, which is entirely in keeping with the series of official pratfalls that have marked this case.
Should there have been a finding of breach at all? The published reasons fall some way short of offering complete assurance that the correct outcome has been reached. The line adopted by the disciplinary panel seems as tenuous and open to argument as some of the evidence it heard last month.
While the sole BHA witness, John, was found to be an unreliable and sometimes untruthful witness, the panel eventually preferred his version of events to Best’s. It cited video footage of the two races and Best’s behaviour at the time as backing up what John said.
But what can we make of this? It’s a particular surprise to see legal minds of the calibre of Norris and Sir William Gage indulging in the betting shop folly that a jockey’s intentions can be inferred by merely watching him on a TV screen, to the extent of asserting that “the ride at Towcester was without doubt a ‘stopping’ ride”.
The phrase “without doubt” hardly belongs in horse racing, a world in which horses and jockeys can always surprise you but are more likely to disappoint, wherein each curious turn of events has a dozen possible explanations. Its use here suggests a certain naivety in the panel’s analysis. While the expert witness in this case did not impress, there must surely be scope for making more and better use of experts for questions of race-riding in future, rather than leaving it to panellists whose qualifications for such a task are unclear.
The panel took against Best, they say, because he saw fatigue in John’s ride at Plumpton where they did not and because he did not respond as they would have done to the ruling of the Towcester stewards that John had deliberately ridden a non-trying race. “Any competent trainer would definitely have wanted to tell two important owners that a jockey had been found guilty of intentionally ‘stopping’ a horse,” they write.
Is it impossible to imagine that a trainer might not want to go looking for that sort of trouble? Anyway, the panel does not like the fact that this trainer does not behave as it thinks proper. Elsewhere, it describes as “bizarre” Best’s failure to discipline John over an offensive message.
Briefly, the panel considers the possibility that John might have stopped the horses for the benefit of an accomplice betting against them but waves that away as “wholly theoretical”, no evidence having been led on the subject. It seems an airy way to dismiss an almost unexplored line of inquiry. Having concluded that these were indeed stopping rides, the panel asks itself: “Who stands to benefit?” and decides Best was probably responsible.
Would it have been so difficult, instead, to concede this was a case of one accused man’s word against another with no sign of the definitive, independent piece of evidence that would show where the truth lay?
Perhaps this sort of outcome is what we should expect where complex disciplinary matters are decided on the balance of probabilities. But it’s hard not to wince at the prospect of livelihoods being taken away on the basis of such a problematic case, in which the behaviour of the pursuing regulator has been so worthy of criticism.
