Jockeys optimistic BHA will ease whip rules after crisis meeting

• Turf officials to hold talks in attempt to avert threat of strike
• Andrew Thornton says riders were not properly consulted

Chris Cook
guardian.co.uk,     Sunday 16 October 2011 21.13 BST

One week after stiff new rules on whip use were introduced, a crisis meeting will take place on Monday to identify how they can be changed so as to avoid outright mutiny by jockeys. A strike by the riders, initially planned for Monday, has been set aside for now and there was hope in the weighing room here on Sunday that there will be no need to revive the threat.

"They've admitted that they've got it wrong," said Andrew Thornton, a Cheltenham Gold Cup winner who now serves on the board of the Professional Jockeys Association. "They've admitted they shouldn't have brought it in when they did. They've admitted that there needs to be a tweaking of the rules. They've admitted an awful lot."

Thornton was referring to a television interview given by Paul Roy, the chairman of the British Horseracing Authority, from Ascot on Saturday, when he said: "We will get this sorted out. There are going to be changes." The monthly meeting for the BHA board was already scheduled for Monday morning and, at its conclusion, a delegation from the PJA will be ushered in for what may prove a protracted discussion.

Kevin Darley, the PJA's chief executive, will be present but, as recently as Saturday afternoon, did not know who would accompany him. Ryan Moore and Tony McCoy are thought likely to attend, although McCoy has booked rides at Plumpton. Asked what he hoped to get from the meeting, McCoy would only say: "To get everyone to stop talking about it."

Thornton was especially upset by Roy's suggestion that the new rules had been endorsed by jockeys ahead of their introduction. "The word 'endorse' suggests to me that you've been consulted all the way along the process and you've been at a final meeting." He insisted that the first he and his colleagues had known about the final detail of the rules was when they were published three weeks ago.

During the 10-month review of the whip rules, Thornton said that he was only consulted in the form of a meeting about a month ago at the BHA, also attended by McCoy, Darley, Richard Johnson and Graham Lee. "Things were mentioned of what we could and couldn't do. They were chatted about.

"Not everything was discussed in detail, ie, you can gather from that, our riding fees, our percentages. They were mentioned but they certainly weren't discussed at great length.

"It was one hell of a shock to the system to hear what the punishments were going to be, how severe they were going to be. The amount of times you could give a horse a tap with the air-cushioned stick were cut in half and the punishments were quadrupled.

"We all understand something had to be done and we all accept that but the punishments which were meted out [in the form of lengthened suspensions] were, in our eyes, severe enough without the added punishment of fees and percentages being taken away."

Thornton feels his colleagues who ride on the Flat have been "trapped" by the rule that limits them to five strokes in the final furlong, which has caught out a number of high-profile riders.

He also feels that it is not reasonable to expect jump jockeys to keep an accurate tally of their whip use during a race that may last more than five minutes."You go round at 30mph, there's gaps opening, there's gaps closing, there's horses in front of you making mistakes. You take your hands off the reins to give the horse a couple of taps to waken it up, you're expected to count?"