A large proportion of stable staff are women© Photo Healy Racing
Can you work out this riddle? - A man takes his son for a drive in his car. The car crashes, the man is killed and his boy is injured. When the boy arrives in hospital he is taken for surgery. The surgeon takes one look at the boy and says “I can’t operate on that boy, he is my son.”
I spent about five minutes trying to figure this out the other day and was getting nowhere until I was eventually told the answer. The reason I was struggling with it is something called unconscious bias. We all have it and most of the time we’ve no idea we have it, which is obviously why it’s called unconscious bias.
The answer to the riddle if you haven’t already worked it out is that the surgeon was the boy’s mother. We automatically assume that the surgeon is a man.
When it comes to horse racing our unconscious bias must be on steroids. The trainer, the jockey, the owner, the breeder, the steward, the bookie. The automatic assumption is that they are all men. And in truth the vast majority still are.
In this day and age you would presume that horse racing is an equal opportunities industry, but certainly as far as the public facing aspects of the sport are concerned that doesn’t bear out. Jessica Harrington and Rachael Blackmore are the only women in the top 20 in Ireland among trainers and jockeys under either code.
34 horses contested the two Newmarket Guineas races over the weekend and all 34 horses were trained by men and all 34 were ridden by men.
Horse Racing Ireland tells us that the industry employs around 28,000 people, either directly or indirectly, but there is no breakdown of how many are male or female. Anecdotally there are large numbers of women working across the industry and they probably make up the majority in many racing yards, but it must be more about their love for the horses than any defined career path that keeps them involved.
The glass ceiling within racing is double glazed and it isn’t just women that find themselves on the wrong side of it. Trainer David Dunne looks to have been somewhat hard done by at his recent Appeal.
Dunne, a small trainer with a young family, was a co-accused in the Ronan McNally case and received a six months suspension of his licence and a €5,000 fine for his role.
He recently appealed against the severity of his sanctions, but he didn't have the resources to pay for legal representation and this looks to have put him at a distinct disadvantage.
During the Appeal he tried to argue that some of the findings against him at the original Referral Hearing were not sound and “he had to be reminded that he had taken no appeal against those findings but, rather, his appeal was confined only to the question of sanctions.”
“In essence his complaint was that he felt he had been unfairly dealt with in circumstances where the named person (another licensed trainer that was mentioned in the original Referral) in his view had broken the same Rules of Racing but had not been investigated or charged.”
“The IHRB contends that the appeal is without merit and that it is irrelevant that a third party named by the appellant was not charged or sanctioned. It makes the point that the sole issue was whether the sanction imposed was reasonable and not whether someone else could have been charged.”
In other words the IHRB wouldn’t entertain any arguments from David Dunne that didn’t specifically relate to the severity of his original sanctions. This appears to me to be quite draconian.
In cases like Dunne’s where someone’s livelihood is at stake it seems wholly unfair that because of a lack of money they are pitted against experienced barristers in a courtroom setting without any access to free legal aid.
Not surprisingly, Dunne lost his Appeal and to rub salt into the wound he must now pay an additional €2,000 towards the IHRB’s legal costs.
Lastly, it was pointed out to me over the weekend that there were considerably more equine deaths at the recent Punchestown Festival than at either Aintree or Cheltenham. I suppose that is somewhat to be expected as more horses ran at Punchestown (492) compared to Aintree (320) or Cheltenham (444), but with Punchestown racecourse averaging ten fatalities in each of the last three seasons it would be worthy of further investigation to see how the track can be made safer.
