A simple solution to the whip issue?

Apart from destroying the betting market

elise posted an excellent response to this proposal on another thread a couple of days ago.

you absolute berk


im taking a month off

How would it destroy the betting market?

Disqualifications would be rare once we have told jockeys about the new system. Even where horses are disqualified, there will still be a winner of the race, whose backers will be paid out. Bookmakers will have the option of paying on both, as some betting shops do now.

Fine in principal but practical,no,giving the whole shooting match back to amateurs to decide the outcome.

Giving the whole shooting match to anyone who can count.

We need two things: first, limits that are practical in a race situation, so do not depend on being able to judge perfectly when you are in line with a furlong marker you might not even be able to see if there are horses on your inside.

Then, disqualification for cheating. No fines, no bans; just disqualification.

UTTER NONSENSE - NotreDame.

You CANNOT be a serious staking punter.

How on earth could you have a Monkey each way on a horse - or a Grand to WIN - and then ENDURE the excruciating pain - EVERY RACE - of worrying whether your WINNER will  be disqualified  by a bunch of Amateur Stewards.

It bad enough trying to win the money in the first place ..... Let alone TWICE.

Onlooker.nap spot on.

Yeah, I remember the days when it was still possible to be disqualified for barging another horse out of the way.

Or do I? Because I also seem to remember that somehow the betting market survived.

Simple rules, simple penalty: disqualification.

This idea if put into practise would kill racing. Jockeys would not use the whip. The reason the BHA have not banned the whip is that is needed for safety reasons but owners/trainers may say never use the whip.

The point is missed. You assume the rule makes sense and is correct.
From all my reading the rule is not correct and does not make sense.

The solution is to go back to the way it was. Educate people about the cushioned whip and if it needs more cushioning then do it. From the Guardian experiment it seems it does not need to be redesigned. Tell the looney tunes to **** off.
Get back to normal and work to promote racing instead of trying to destroy it.

Six gun, I agree the rule, certainly in its original version, was impractical, with X strokes here and Y strokes there, and needing to  be able to judge where precisely the furlong marker is (and anyone who has ever lost a bet on a photo-finish will know how difficult that is, and we have a line across the course to help us).

So the rule needs to be both simple and practical.

But the rule also needs to be enforced and the way to do that effectively is by disqualifying the horse, not banning or fining the jockey.

It is too much to disqualify the horse. It will not help racing.
Let us imagine in the Grand National, Red Rum had had one too many wacks.
Red Rum was really well known. People who had never heard of a race horse had heard of Red Rum. Red Rum gets disqualified.
Imagine the amount of sh1t hitting the fan.
Imagine if Zenyatta or Seabiscuit got disqualified. Super horses who won hands down were disqualified for one too many smacks with the whip. I do not like to think about it.

The rule needs to be sensible. The current rule is not sensible. It is arbitrary. It is illogical.

If it is there to protect horses then where is the weight of evidence it will do this?
There isn't the evidence. In deed the evidence is the old rules did not harm horses since the cushioned whip came in.

So what is the new rule about? It does not appear to be to protect horses. It is because of pressure groups. Looney tunes who make out the whip is brutally harming horses. The ban AP got on New Year's Day for whipping Deano's Beeno 50 times before the start of a race at Cheltenham.
The stewards issue was not that it harms the horse but they felt it would have been upsetting for Channel 4 viewers.

There needs to be a rule where sanctions are unusual and are for logical, scientifically based reasons. Not emotive clap trap from Animal Aid. I do not like to see animals harmed. I am a vegetarian even. But I do not agree to a rule brought in which is not evidence based and is simply there to please pressure groups.

Let us imagine that Red Rum's jockey knew the rules, knew the penalties, and had not been bribed to throw the race.

Look, there are two parts to this. First, the rule itself. I do not claim to know what it should be, but it should be simple and practical in a race, which I think we can agree the current one is not, and its original form was absurd.

But whatever the rule is, the penalty should be disqualification.

Surely it all comes down to, how can you break the rules and still be allowed to win?  Is there another sport on the planet where that is the case?  And all the discussion about taking money off jockeys and bannng them is in my view just a convoluted and flawed attempt to find a respectable way of maintaining the current system where you can win whilst not abiding by the rules.

As for betting, I don't think it would be a problem for very long, if at all; can you imagine an owner paying the fortunes that they do to buy and keep a horse in training or a trainer being happy to use a jockey if they cause their winning horse to lose by breaking the rules?

It would very quickly become I think a self-policing rule.

In the short term, with regards to betting, as Ramruma says, there would still be a winner, or maybe for a period betting shops could pay out on both the winner and the first past the post or maybe you would just have to think about which horse and rider you'd be happy to back; but I don't think it would be an issue for long at all, the amount of times the rules would be broken would plummet I would guess to near zero, very quickly.

Regarding Onlookers' point about ''amatuer stewards'' and the worry about disqualification. I thought the new rules removed the previously subjective decision of what was ok and what wasn't; there's a number allowed, over that and it's not allowed, so it realy shouldn't be stressful for a punter often.

And don't forget everytime you back a horse, you are entrusting the jockey too; you are trusting that they will go the right route, count the number of circuits, not fall off etc, a horse can't win without a jockey, even if he is the fastest in the race. To that list, you would just be adding that you trust them to stay within the whip allowance. How is that different to trusting them to count the number of circuits etc?

And with no possibility of being allowed to keep the race if you go over the limit, if i was a jockey it would take a lot to even get me near the limit.

In the end it wouldn't come down to stewards and jockeys but how many wealthy owners were involved in litigation against the BHA to get their prize money back.

Most owners are out of pocket keeping racehorses. How many would stick it if the BHA were stealing their money.

Godolphin probably already considering their future in UK racing since they won't have their No.1 jockey for the Breeders Cup.

I think Graham Cunningham referred to the disqualification of horses for whip offences as the "nuke" option.

I totally agree that we can't have horses being disqualified wrt betting but the disincentive of losing the race wrt prize money should be there. I suggested elsewhere that, after the weigh-in so betting isn't affected, they add a distance per extra slap (e.g. 0.25 lengths) to a horses distance beaten and amend the official result based on the revised distance. That way there's no incentive to go a slap or two extra in big money races. How would Godolphin feel if their horse was beaten a sh hd in the Derby by a horse that was given a couple of slaps over the seven?

This is where the 7 hit rule is crazy, why on earth any jockey thought this figure was a good idea

The guideline figure was six a few years ago.

Well that worked really well Ramruma.

How many sports exist where you are allowed to break the rules and still win?
A foul in football is breaking the rules. Does the team get disqualified? No.
What would happen if that happened?
British football will end. The leagues would finish.

There will be significant negative downsides on racing if this rule continues and jockeys continue to be banned.
If horses were disqualified it would end the sport as we know it.

You must always go back to the basis of the rule. Why is it there?
Pressure from the likes of Animal Aid, RSPCA.
Response to the media.
Belief that use of the whip is turning the public off racing and this is the reason racing is declining.

How many years was racing on the BBC and ITV? This was in the days when the whip left wheals on horses. Yes opinions change and what was accepted years ago is no longer accepted but I do not believe for a moment that use of the whip is in any way responsible for even 1% of the decline in racing.

People don't see racing on the TV any more. It's on Channel 4 now and again. RUK is subscription and ATR is not free to Sky, although it is on Virgin Media. Betting on football has exploded.

Some people are getting wrapped up in the breaking of the rule.
The rule is wrong. Jockeys say they cannot get the best from their horses without the whip. They are not deliberately getting bans and losing prizes and fees.

Carry on with this rule. Kill racing off.
I make more money from football than ever I do on racing.

Players cheat all the time in football. They dive to get a pen or a player sent off.They handball to control the ball and score.

The RSPCA has long been the most pro-racing of the animal charities.

The analogy with football is false because it is a team game, and because it's timeframe allows for in-game sanctions. If a footballer scores from an offside position, the goal is disallowed. If a footballer is sent off, the team cannot replace him. You could argue that a jockey who breaks the rules should be "sent off" and the horse regarded as crossing the line alone, which in turn would lead to disqualification, but by this time the analogy is being stretched to breaking point.

Some football offences, like fielding ineligible players, can result in the equivalent of disqualification with the win being awarded to the other side.

six gun is right that there are many other reasons the public is falling out of love with racing but those things can be dealt with separately.

If there are to be any restrictions at all on the use of the whip, then there have to be sanctions for breaking those rules. The most effective, and fairest, will be disqualification.

Fines are arbitrary, and might be settled by less than honest connections who have encouraged the jockey to break the rules to land a punt. Bans rob the jockey of a chance to earn a living, and are also arbitrary as it depends what race meetings are due next, and can punish wholly innocent connections: why should I not be able to engage Fred Archer if his ban was incurred when riding for someone else?