THE SUNSHINE COAST NEWSPAPER COLUMN - STEWARDS FACE AN UPHILL BATTLE ON THREE FRONTS

By Graham Potter | Sunday, February 23, 2014

Graham Potter writes a weekly column for the Sunshine Coast daily. Due to demand from those having trouble accessing the paper these columns are now also published on HRO courtesy of the Sunshine Coast daily

The position of Chief Steward (Thoroughbreds) at Racing Queensland has been filled with Allan Reardon appointed to the role with which he is familiar. That appointment ends an unfortunate and arguably unnecessary situation where the position was left in limbo after the original application deadline was extended.

However Reardon marshals his troops the steward’s panel faces an uphill task on three fronts.

Firstly, Reardon and his team have to find a way to win back the respect of punters.

Rightly or wrongly, not enough of that respect currently exists. Criticism directed at stewards flows free and fast whenever the perception arises that they are not tackling certain situations hard enough … and that will probably always be the case as opinions differ, some more loudly than others, on how racing incidents can be interpreted.

Ultimately, stewards are there to independently uphold the punters right to fairness and not pamper to their whims but it would do no harm if Reardon were to take a step back and re-evaluate procedures and duties to see if any improvement to their vigilance and follow-up actions might be possible.

In other words, he should ascertain if stewards have any leeway to lift their game?

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Secondly, stewards are up against a modern day ‘natural justice’ system that sometimes seems to defeat its own purpose.

Let’s suppose for a minute that stewards handle all of their roles to perfection. They identify wrong-doers, notice every transgression, pick up every point needing to be queried.

They then charge a culprit, find the person guilty and hand out a suitable penalty.

What happens next?

Well, these days most appeal the verdict. Even the most inexperienced apprentice now generally appeals the steward’s finding, rides under a stay of proceedings and then, very often, wins an appeal after a sometimes long drawn our process which was decided upon by people not necessarily involved in racing full time.

In those cases not only is the verdict altered, but the ramifications of such findings are significant as those who win their appeal walk away with less respect for steward’s authority.

We had heard the word ‘farce’ mentioned all too often with regard to this exercise.

Some won’t like the solution, but the bottom line is stewards need to gain more unconditional power if they are going to have any chance of doing their job effectively!

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The third task confronting stewards is to settle the waters in-house.

The word is nobody in the department was happy during the delayed process of selecting a leader. There has been a suggestion that Reardon was a reluctant candidate, in fact it has been suggested that he was supposedly thinking of withdrawing his application at one stage … while RQ kept all its options open by extending the application deadline and thus opened up conjecture as to their motivation for doing so.

Let’s hope not all of that the hearsay that surfaced was true otherwise we would be left with an RQ Board who arguably would have preferred to have someone else at the helm, a Chief Steward who would have preferred not to get the top job working with some colleagues who might be disgruntled having possibly missed out on the opportunity themselves.

We all know how well that would work!

But now it is time to let the steward’s panel get on with it.

So let’s give them some room.

They have a mountain to climb!

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