Racing’s answer to the GAA handpass furore? The stewards’ inquiry
The disqualification of David Marnane’s Separate Ways at Galway, in favour of Luttrell Lady, hasn’t half caused a stir and it is time for the Turf Club to look again at the rules which govern the behaviour of stewards when they are called into action.
The Galway race saw Separate Ways beat Luttrell Lady and then lose the contest in the stewards’ room.
Separate Ways hung to his right in the closing stages, causing Joseph O’Brien to initially snatch up and then switch Luttrell Lady for a final challenge.
Luttrell Lady did finish strongly, but was never going to get back at the winner and was half a length adrift at the line.
An inquiry was quickly called with the conventional wisdom being that the placings would stand.
As I understand the rules, the stewards have to be satisfied the result was materially affected before they can make any alteration. In other words for Luttrell Lady to be given the race they had to think she would have won, but for the interference.
In most cases the rules seem to favour the aggressor, rather than the victim, and this observer has long had a problem with that.
In the Galway case, of course, the stewards, rather surprisingly to a lot of observers, came down on the side of the original second.
That is not what happens in most situations. I wrote here the following day that the stewards got this decision right, but that was only because, at least in certain instances, I have always favoured the benefit of the doubt going to the victim.
If the stewards were to follow precedent then they would almost certainly have allowed the result to stand and that’s the problem.
Before they could reverse the placings, they had to be convinced the interference caused to Luttrell lady had cost her the race.
There isn’t a person who could say for sure that was the case and therein lies the problem with the current interpretation of the rules.
The emphasis always seems to be on the victim to prove he/she would have won, granted a clear passage.
Why not interpret it in a different manner? Where the stewards cannot decide whether the result was affected or not, then go with the horse who was interfered with, rather than the one who caused the interference.
Most stewards inquiries will continue to be open-and-shut cases. Separate Ways has been compared to another which took place at Galway, the handicap hurdle won by Hoopy. But there was no comparison at all, of course.
The interference caused by Hoopy to runner-up, King Of Redfield, was much more pronounced, but took place literally on the line and the result was in no way affected. The world and its mother knew a reversal of the placings was never a possibility.
The Separate Ways incident was a much more difficult scenario on which to adjudicate. Indeed, it moved both Ryan McElligott and Ted Walsh to toss some of their toys out of the pram.
Ryan, not given to emotional outbursts, was moved to describe the promotion of Luttrell Lady, in his report in the Irish Field, as “one of the most surprising decisions seen on a racecourse for some time”.
In the same Irish Field they gave an excellent account of what went on on RTE between Robert Hall and Ted and Ruby Walsh and that had to make for wonderful television. These are some of the comments Ted was reported to have made: “As I’ve said I’ve given up on inquiries. I used to have an opinion on them one time, but they can go anyway you like in Ireland.
“I don’t think there will be any change myself, I might be wrong. I have absolutely no idea what stewards are going to do, I don’t even know what goes on in their heads, they see racing completely differently than I do.”
And then Ted finished with a real blast, when it was put to him by Hall that the stewards sometimes make good decisions.
“And they make some diabolical ones as well, not bad ones, diabolical ones, some of them should be hung, drawn and quartered. They shouldn’t even be let into a stewards’ room, but they’re in there.”
Perhaps Ted might tone that one down in the cold light of day. But it does, along with McElligott’s response, emphasise the growing frustration felt by people within the game at the complexity of the current rules.
They are hit-and-miss and might as well have been drawn up by the people who decided on that crazy hand-pass in gaelic football. The inconsistencies can be resolved by favouring the victim in calls which are especially tight, thus removing the advantage currently enjoyed by the aggressor.
