Instinctual Drift isn’t the name of a runner at Cheltenham next week, but it could prove a festival factor that adds to a needless self-inflicted cloud that will hang over the biggest meeting of the year.
In many ways, the cloud’s already in place. Narratives that should be dominating the build-up like the emergence of a generational talent like Constitution Hill or the chances of Willie Mullins reaching a century of festival winners are being sidetracked due to wrangling about the whip.
A sport that ought to be gearing up its best bib and tucker to showcase itself in front of a mass audience is instead fretfully tiptoeing around the grenade lobbed into the mix by the British Horseracing Authority at a time all but guaranteed to cause the biggest explosion.
The BHA’s decision to change its whip rules just weeks before Cheltenham has plunged cross-channel racing into bitter conflict.
As well as much heftier penalties for jockeys exceeding the limit of seven strokes, or if they employ the whip in certain ways such as over shoulder height, critically, the new rules also mean disqualification for horses whose riders exceed 11 strokes.
Such a step was predicted to be highly unlikely when the new regulations came in recently. The first ‘DQ’ came on the very first day. Or rather the offence occurred on the very first day. The actual disqualification came the following week.
In order not to interfere with bookmakers paying out, disqualifications are carried out by a review committee days after the event. All told it’s a logistical hotchpotch that makes Brexit look like a cool exercise in pragmatism.
However, even the most strident Brexiter might struggle to cook up a more convoluted scenario whereby Cheltenham starts on Tuesday with the final results maybe not decided until the following Tuesday.
It being Cheltenham though, this isn’t just a cross-channel cock-up. Jockeys in Britain have at least had some time to ride under the rules. Irish riders haven’t. They’ve had to make do with video seminars and lectures.
Next week they’ll enter the Cheltenham cauldron cold, armed with the theoretical but critically short of the applied. And since Irish horses are widely expected to maintain their overwhelming festival dominance, their jockeys will inevitably be to the forefront.
So, when competition is at its most intense, and riders under pressure to deliver resort to the whip, how reasonable is it to expect all of them not to fall back on Instinctual Drift, the idea that we might learn to perform different behaviours but revert to instinct under pressure.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the new whip regulations, and it’s hard to argue with a lot of them, it is a reputational disaster waiting to happen when a governing body presumes to change the rules at the most pressurised time of the year and assumes it won’t blow up in their faces.
Irish jockeys are on a hiding to nothing. In a week when not an inch is given or expected, and that inch can be the difference between victory and defeat, expecting suitable compliance with alien regulations is expecting way too much.
Anxious to prevent headlines about whip use with the eyes of the sporting world on Cheltenham, the BHA has managed to all but guarantee headlines about whip use, and there’s the potential for protracted scareheads carrying into the following week as a miserable cherry on top.
More improbable scenarios will get bet on next week than one where the Gold Cup aftermath is dominated by anxious totting up of the whip strokes employed by a rider, followed by massive coverage around a potential disqualification.
Nobody, least of all jockeys, can reasonably want that. But in the heat of battle instinct tends to win out. The BHA’s failure to appreciate and anticipate such problems smacks of a regulator badly out of touch.
In a context where racing here has come under withering attack in recent years for failures of governance – God knows, often for very good reason – it’s a timely reminder that regulatory foul-ups are hardly exclusive to Ireland.
We are also approaching the 10th anniversary of the biggest doping scandal of the lot involving Godolphin’s trainer Mahmood Al Zarooni. That deplorable chapter in racing history occurred on the BHA’s turf and appeared to be handled with as much expediency as haste.
That some cross-channel establishment voices seem to instinctually drift into a supercilious tone towards blunders here underscores the dangers of throwing stones in glasshouses, perhaps underlining too how convenient it is to throw them in houses other than one’s own.
It’s certainly hard not to suspect that if the BHA’s untimely move on the whip was replicated by authorities anywhere else there would be widespread ridicule from across the Irish Sea.
Cheltenham is always a reminder of how jump racing is a double-act in these islands. On this occasion one partner is entitled to echo Laurel & Hardy and point out how this is another fine mess they’ve been got into.
Something For The Weekend
Cayd Boy (3.45) has been costly to follow but could be worth another chance in Gowran’s featured handicap on Saturday. First-time cheekpieces are applied and that could sharpen up his jumping enough to finally deliver in a decent pot.
Peter Fahey won last year’s Imperial Cup with Surprise Package and is back for another crack at Saturday’s Sandown prize with Zoffany Bay. It is Paul Fahey however who could strike this time courtesy of Man O Work (2.25.)
