cock-up, au-dela des pistes & 1.5-million quid!

​A thousand-years later and the winner of the 2024 Cesarewitch is finally declared and this time it is Alphonse Le Grand. The wheel turns and turns again and we are back where we started. How embarrassing! What a cock-up!
It has now been decided under appeal that the Whip Review Committee was wrong, undermining the whole whip review policy and that Jamie Powell, although he intended to strike his mount ten-times, four over the legal limit, the final strike, the one that should and did and then didn’t get the horse disqualified, was accidental as he missed where he intended to hit the horse and by chance brushed the skin of the horse in another part of its body altogether. It is not complicated at all, if you have all the angles covered.
If the Newmarket stewards had disqualified Alphonse Le Grand on the day of the race, connections could have fought their case on the Tuesday and perhaps, possibly, though perhaps not, won their appeal. Though then the connections of Manxman might have appealed and it would still have taken a thousand-years to know the winner.
Bollocks, do you not agree?
Perhaps a better way to have found the legitimate winner would to have had a run-off on the Tuesday, the two horses and jockeys taking part in a duel on the Heath as in the dark yet less complicated days of yore.
The only answer to stop this sort of affairs ever happening again in a major race is for there to be automatic disqualification when a jockey goes one stroke above the permitted six. If six is the golden number, any number of strokes above that will come with disqualification and disqualification on the day. Sean ‘the flat’ Bowen stayed within the whip rules, Jamie Powell did not. Which of those two jockeys deserves to have a Cesarewitch winner on their c.v.? Powell now must serve a 20-day ban for going over the permitted number of strokes by 3 and must pay a fine that is pretty hefty for an apprentice who until the Cesarewitch had all but been forgotten about.

In France, on Arc day, they had what was termed ‘the Arc Promise’ when connections of winning horses at the two-day meeting were asked or expected to donate a percentage of their winnings to Au-Dela Des Pistes, the French programme for the retraining of racehorses and those who simply deserve a long and happy retirement. They have the same ‘promise’ at the two-day Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris meeting. This one gesture this year contributed 15% of the total revenue for Au-Dela Des Pistes.
Why can France have such a scheme in place and yet our B.H.A. cannot set in motion a similar scheme in Britain?

A similar thought. There is to be, starting today at Cheltenham, the David Power Jockeys Cup, a championship for jockeys comprising every race televised by I.T.V. up until the second-day of the Grand National meeting. Quite why it does not incorporate National day itself is not explained. There is a staggering 1.5-million quid to be dolled out to the top ten jockeys, with money also going to the trainers of their winners and stable staff. Given the importance of horse welfare to the ‘social licence’, could they not have taken a leaf out of the French book and asked for a promised percentage from all participants to go towards the funding of aftercare and retraining of racehorses? Is it too much to ask owners, trainers and jockeys to contribute to the funding of such vital equine charities? If 1% of that 1.5-million were to be presented to R.o.R. or any of our worthy equine charities it would represent not only a noble gesture but would go a long way to secure the funding required to keep these charities going.