THE SUNSHINE COAST NEWSPAPER COLUMN - WHEN JOCKEYS RECEIVE A 'SUSPENSION' FROM THE TRAINER

By Graham Potter | Saturday, March 4, 2017

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.

It has been a long established practice for trainers to hand out their own penalties to jockeys who have upset them in in some way.

In simple terms a trainer will ‘suspend’ the jockey by not engaging him or her for any more rides for a period of time. That suspension is generally imposed for an undetermined period of time and it will remain in place until that trainer or connections involved ‘get over it’ or until those involved kiss and make up.

Most of these unofficial suspensions are imposed for what the trainer or connections believe to be a bad ride or a series of bad rides.

A few of these ‘fall-outs’ have been played out loudly and publically in a manner which can have you believing a particular jockey has been given a life ban by a particular stable ... but that eventuality seldom materialises.

The majority of these suspensions though remain in-house affairs and are only noted by a change of jockey in the horse’s form-line.

So trainers ‘suspend’ jockeys all the time ... but for a trainer to put in a request to stewards to replace a jockey on a horse mid-meeting because of his dissatisfaction with an earlier ride by that jockey is an extreme response seldom brought into play.

Yet that is exactly what happened at Beaudesert on Tuesday where a young apprentice produced a ride, contrary to instructions, which upset his trainer to such a degree that the trainer wanted to impose his ‘suspension’ with immediate effect by removing that jockey from another stable engagement on the day.

Stewards acceded to the trainer’s request which raised many an eyebrow.

The issue here is not so much the trainer’s right to put in such a request or the stewards power to adjudicate the matter in the manner in which they did ... although both of these points have been questioned by critics and can clearly be vigorously debated ... but rather the issue becomes one of whether a precedent has now been set.

My understanding is that such situations are dealt with on a case by case basis by stewards ... but the question remains, will we now see more such ‘spur of the moment, in the heat of battle’ requests of this nature?

Hopefully that is unlikely ... but then again nobody saw the Beaudesert scenario coming!