Kissed By Angels and Seamus Heffernan© Photo Healy Racing
Nature might abhor a vacuum but lawyers love them. There's probably a joke there about nature abhorring lawyers too but that doesn't prevent vacuums being perfect spaces for possibilities and it's damn hard to firmly contradict a possibility.
Basically, once all the posturing and legal rigmarole is stripped away, the reopened running and riding enquiry into Foxrock and his notorious front shoes at Punchestown in December boiled down to what happened from around 3.13 when the horse left the parade ring after the race to around 3.20 when Foxrock was observed by the veterinary officer on duty.
When the Turf Club announced it was reopening the case on the basis of new video evidence, racing's countless barrack-room lawyers speculated the regulatory body might be in possession of something significant on film besides pictures of the horse wearing his front shoes immediately after the race. They weren't.
Then there was a suggestion among the same barrack-room briefs that in order to explain why the Turf Club was pursuing their case with such vigour, they had to have somebody saying they directly saw something untoward happening that day. They didn't.
What they had was film of the horse wearing shoes when the original steward's enquiry report stated they'd been lost during the race. And they had suspicions that the shoes had been purposely removed by trainer Ted Walsh or his assistants before that steward's enquiry, suspicions based, the Turf Club maintained, on circumstantial evidence.
Crucially, what they never had was any firm evidence, either on film, or from anyone, of anything dubious occurring between 3.13 and 3.20.
Any meaningful look through the Turf Club case would have made clear this vacuum in their argument. You don't have to have darkened the doors of Blackhall Place to realise this. So why did the Turf Club persevere?
If they'd proved their case, Walsh's career and reputation would have hung by a thread. This was not trivial stuff. And yet this glaring absence doesn't appear to have set off alarm bells. Why not? Did they think Walsh was going to employ an incompetent to represent him?
As it happens Walsh was represented by no less than a former Attorney General and Minister for Justice. Heavyweight supporters resolutely stood by their man. Sure enough, a case was made for the shoes coming off in circumstances completely different to what the Turf Club argued. With no firm evidence to the contrary, any decision other than Walsh being fully exonerated of any wrongdoing was unthinkable.
But all of this was so predictable that you have to wonder why the matter was pursued at all. A body badly in need of a win after having had its reputation knocked to hell over steroids hardly needed another reputational battering and yet it's wound up getting one.
A look at the report - and it is definitely worth reading - indicates reputational damage isn't entirely confined to the Turf Club. There are individuals who may wince when looking back. But that's short-term embarrassment quickly forgotten.
In contrast the long-term implications will be on the integrity service and ultimately Irish racing's integrity as a whole. And that's of supreme importance to everyone, especially those of us outside the racing tent.
Unfashionable as it may be to admit it, the integrity service is supposed to be on our side and this sorry episode means its credibility has been diluted even further, along, possibly, with its will to act in future when required.
The Dante is often the most significant Derby trial of all but a lot looks to be riding on this Thursday's York renewal.
By any standards, this is an open Derby year. Aidan O'Brien's apparent first-division contenders keep getting beaten. Zawraq missed the Derrinstown and wound up with his price cut. And topping the betting is Jack Hobbs, a colt who broke his maiden on December 27 at Wolverhampton, and landed a handicap, albeit impressively, off a mark of just 85. We're hardly talking a Shergar or Sea The Stars year.
Maybe John F Kennedy or Ol' Man River will rehabilitate their reputations in spectacular style on Thursday and impose some order on the Derby picture but it's very hard to convincingly argue how after abysmal last starts. And maybe Jack Hobbs was the greatest certainty of all time when he ran off 85. Elm Park is even starting to look a real contender simply through not having run yet this season.
But hopefully something asserts its authority in the Dante because otherwise it will shape up as one of the most underwhelming Derby fields in a long time.
Certainly on the back of a Ballysax-Derrinstown winning campaign, the popular Curragh trainer Ken Condon is entitled to think big with Success Days and a soft ground Derby could even see the likeable grey colt become an Epsom contender.
But bookmakers appear to reckon if there was a classic winner at Leopardstown over the weekend it was the regally bred filly Kissed By Angels who broke her maiden on just her second start in the Group 3 Guineas Trial. She's now as low as 14-1 for the Oaks. Of course her performance came on very testing ground but she's bred to relish much better conditions and she added to an already formidable list of Coolmore's Oaks contenders.
Kissed By Angels clearly boosted her jockey Seamus Heffernan's confidence since his other Sunday ride, Bondi Beach's short-head defeat of an odds-on stable companion, was a masterpiece of nerve.
Talking of barrack-room lawyers, there have been some admiring if comparatively incredulous racecourse comments about Michael Hussey's decision to appeal the severity of the fourteen day suspension he picked up over his Curragh ride on My Painter when the jockey admitted to not seeing the winner on the wide outside of the field.
One even managed to proportionally equate Hussey's neck to other parts of his anatomy, suggesting the jockey must be a happy man indeed.
But what has he got to lose by appealing? Everyone else is doing it so why shouldn't he? Once lawyers get involved, you never know what can happen.
