a sad and disturbing disclosure.

​I’ve never been under the illusion that the weighing room is or ever was a sanctuary of propriety. High-jinks, ribaldry and the ups and downs of sporting endeavour would dominate on a daily basis, I would suspect, over morality, prayer and chivalrous conduct. ‘All’s fair in love and war’ might be the unsaid motto of such a cloistered assembly room.
Of course, the weighing room has been for a hundred-years or more, at least until more recent times, a male sanctum, with, as it once was considered on sailing-ships, an underlying emphasis on it being ‘no place for the fairer sex to be found’. Men will be men, of course, and men who risk life and limb four or five-times a day on a daily basis might have a different code of ethics than us poor mortals whose dull lives are not enlightened by entry to the hallowed room where brave men slip on the coloured cloths of their profession.
But as ugly and corrupted as 2020 might have been, with our daily lives continuing to be blighted by an insanity no one could think ever possible, we have moved on from the time of ‘On The Buses’ and ‘Confessions of a Window-Cleaner’. To read that the B.H.A. are holding an investigation into complaints of bullying by her weighing room colleagues by Bryony Frost is as sad and disturbing a news-story as has confronted me since the disgrace of the Grand National that never was.
That someone as charismatic and publicly loved as Bryony Frost should be subject to harassment from her jockey colleagues is, to those of us outside of the world she inhabits, baffling and deeply upsetting. 
There is, of course, two sides to every story. I doubt very much if Bryony is saintly. Indeed, I would be surprised if she could not hold her ground in any assault on her character. But I cannot believe she is anything other than a good human being and reading between the lines it seems others are involved, people for what ever reason she is trying to protect. It is what you would expect of her, is it not, to put the welfare of others before her own? Perhaps at the start of her troubles she stepped in to help a colleague who was being bullied or made fun of and as a result unwittingly drew the fire onto herself.
After the King George, I thought Paul Nicholls sparing in his praise for what was a consummate winning ride. The same could be said of A.P.McCoy. And all the talk post-race was the de-brief the beaten jockey would be subjected to for allowing Bryony to boss the race.
Of course, at the heart of this will be green-eyed envy and perhaps the denting of machismo, a girl stepping up to the plate and putting the top jockeys in their place, with the journeyman jockeys thinking it should be them given the chances Bryony has been given. I just hope the stokers of the flames do not reside at Ditcheat, the claimers who are in competition with her for rides.
For Bryony’s sake I hope the B.H.A. get their asses in gear and resolve this matter in quick time. For her sake this matter must not drag on; it must not be responsible for removing joy from her eyes and the smile from her face. She is, whether her fellow professionals care for it or not, the best advertisement for the true meaning of our sport, the one jockey with the charm, courage and ability to encourage fresher faces into horse racing. No one in the sport can engage with the public as she can and if the hotspot of this controversy is envy then I suggest one of the senior riders in the weighing room needs to stand-up to remind the culprits of the rights and wrongs of the situation. If jockeys have stood silent while bullying and harassment was going on in front of them, they are as culpable as those lashing out with the barbed words. I, for one, might think twice in the future from buying from the Injured Jockeys Website if I suspect the weighing room is inhabited by dishonourable men capable of malice towards one of its own.

On the Welsh National: Silent Reprieve a very good winner, no matter he carried a feather-weight. And though I must reference Bryony once more, it should not be overlooked that the best horse in the race was Yala Enki. I suspect that time will prove that in trying to give Secret Reprieve the best part of 2-stone he was attempting the impossible, especially if Secret Reprieve were to go on and win the Grand National, where again he is sure to be favourably weighted.
I personally would run Yala Enki in the Grand National, even though he fell at the first in the Becher. Uncharacteristically, Bryony gave him a kick going into the fence and Yala Enki overjumped, landing on his head. Bryony was more unseated than the horse fell and ridden more conservatively I would not be at all surprised if he again finished in the money. In every other staying chase Yala Enki is always going to have to carry a huge weight, making it just as difficult for him to win the top race he deserves as it would be to win at Aintree. And remember, Bryony succeeded in steering Milansbar, another horse notable for missing a fence here and there, to the winning post in the Grand National a few years ago. And Yala Enki is twice the horse Milansbar ever was.