Talking Horses: dangerous riding back on agenda after Free Wind’s win

On 31 August 2009, Tony Culhane rode a horse called Mazzola in a five-furlong handicap at Newcastle. About 10 seconds after the start, he shifted his mount left towards the rail, bumping a horse on his inside which in turn interfered with another against the rail, which fell. At the subsequent stewards’ inquiry, Culhane was banned for 14 days for dangerous riding and ordered to forfeit his fee.

Something approaching 130,000 races have been run in Britain since Culhane picked up his fortnight off, which works out at around 1m individual rides, and yet – officially, at least – his offence is the most recent example of dangerous riding on a British track.

The idea that dangerous riding simply disappeared from our racecourses overnight in 2009 is absurd. As the trainer John Berry put it last October, when he lodged an unsuccessful appeal against a local panel’s decision not to amend the result of a race at Pontefract: “I don’t think anyone believes there hasn’t been any dangerous riding in Britain in the last 12 years. You’d be living in cloud cuckoo land if you thought that.”

But it remains the official version of events, even after an incident in the Lancashire Oaks at Haydock Park on Saturday which many observers believed would finally cross the line into dangerous riding in the opinion of the local stewards.

If you have not yet seen the coming-together between Eshaada, ridden by Jim Crowley, and Free Wind, the mount of Rab Havlin, both the side-on and head-on footage is here.

In summary, Havlin tried make ground on Crowley’s inside – a breach of the unwritten rule that you don’t go up another rider’s inner – about two furlongs out and Crowley appeared to edge over to stop him, causing severe interference in which Free