Justice has been done,” the trainer Philip Hobbs said on Thursday after Declan Lavery, who was banned for 10 days after finishing third on Hobbs’s Jerrysback in last week’s National Hunt Chase at Cheltenham when the stewards decided he had continued on the horse when it had no more to give. And indeed it has, with the appeal panel deciding that Jerrysback did have more to give, as he showed by fighting back for third place having been headed on the run-in.
For some, though, this decision will also be seen as supporting the view that Lavery suffered a gross injustice at Cheltenham, a view shared by Sir Anthony McCoy among others when he described the original verdict as “an absolute disgrace”, “indefensible” and “as bad a decision” as he had seen “in 25 years in racing”. Having watched the closing stages of the race countless times on Thursday morning and from a range of angles that were not available to McCoy or anyone else who criticised the Cheltenham stewards’ decision, I have to disagree.
When the moments after Jerrysback’s tired jump at the second-last are seen from behind and to the left on one of the ‘scout’ cameras, for instance, it could be argued that an exhausted Jerrysback has pulled himself up, never mind waiting for his jockey to do it, stopping to a walk before being rousted back to a gallop by his jockey. Other angles, though, offer strong support to Lavery’s defence that he was giving Jerrysback time to fill his lungs after hitting a flat spot going to two out, and that he would not have attempted to jump the last had he not been confident of clearing it.
It was a judgment call by the original panel, in other words a marginal decision which went one way in the stewards’ room and another way on appeal, but neither verdict was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Justice is a process and the overall result after a brutal renewal of the Festival’s longest race was fair for all those involved – and that includes the two other jockeys in the race – Robert James and Noel McParlan – who were also banned, essentially for the same offence as Lavery.
This is because what was also clear from the footage shown at Thursday’s appeal is that those suspensions were not marginal decisions at all. Both James, who was found to have “used his whip when his horse was showing no response” before falling at the last on Just Your Type, and McParlan, judged to have continued “contrary to the horse’s welfare” before Mulcahys Hill fell at the second-last, deserved to be penalised with 12- and eight-day suspensions respectively.
Before last week’s National Hunt Chase 20 jockeys had been found in breach of this rule in five years and four of those findings were either wholly or partially overturned on appeal. That is roughly one breach of the rule in every 3,100 races – and then there were two in the same event, a novice chase for amateur riders over an extended trip at the biggest meeting of the year.
The National Hunt Chase has a venerable history but the latest renewal was a poor advertisement for jump racing, the Festival and at least two of the riders taking part. So it was disappointing to see Lavery’s initial suspension feeding into the current narrative of a sport at war with itself over welfare issues, to the extent that Henrietta Knight, a Gold Cup winner with Best Mate, put her name to an open letter to the Racing Post which included dark mutterings about the British Horseracing Authority hiring “people from the Antipodes” with no knowledge of jump racing. It is true that jumping has been largely abolished in Australia. It happened because, ultimately, the racing authorities found the much higher rate of fatal injuries in jumps compared with Flat racing impossible to justify.
The same stick can be used to beat British jumping too, because while fatalities have reduced sharply in recent years, thanks in large part to BHA initiatives, they will always be higher in National Hunt. The BHA has a very difficult path to tread and may at times be a little over-zealous but this year’s National Hunt Chase did more to advance the cause of those who seek the end of racing than any vet or executive ever could, Antipodean or otherwise.
