I write this post on the back of yet another jockey mistaking the winning post and easing off a horse too early, costing the win.

This time around, it was at Worcester on September 11, with conditional jockey Elizabeth Gale the culprit this time. Elizabeth has made an error, and she’ll know that, but ultimately, we have to ask, are we doing enough to help jockeys understand their position on the track and where the finishing line is?

Had Elizabeth won yesterday, which she thought she had when easing up, as she believed she had already crossed the line, it would have been the second win of her career under the rules. You can only imagine the emotion she’s going through, combined with tiredness from riding a horse for almost three miles.

I think it’s fair to say people are more likely to make a mistake in those circumstances, and also, we should be doing more to assist jockeys, if possible, and for me, it’s something we can easily fix.

It takes a lot of hard work to become a jockey, and getting regular rides away from the stable you’re associated with is not easy. This error will stay with Gale for many years, and when you look at the setup of Worcester racecourse the circumstances she was in, it is pretty easy to excuse it. We should be looking for ways to avoid any doubt about the winning post by making it stand out as much as possible and be completely different from the rest of the course.

A New Look Winning Post

It’s time for racing to introduce a new look-winning post, make it completely different from anything else on the course, and avoid confusion.

If you look at what happened in this incident at Worcester, technically, Gale went past a post that was all-white in colour and got it mixed up with another post that was predominantly white in colour.

When you look around any racecourse, you will see almost all signs and posts are white. The furlong markers, half furlong markers, running rails, and markers around jumps are all white in colour.

So if this is to remain the same, which I’m fine with, then why not have the winning post a completely different colour altogether, with no white on it?

This way, riders are looking for something completely different, a new colour, that is not used anywhere else on the racecourse, so it should be easier to pick up and remember, even when they’re tired and riding a horse out.

We could go a step further with this and also paint the final 20 yards of the rails the same colour. So, as an example, the running rail and all signs that are not part of the finish are coloured white as they are now. Then, the winning post and final 20 yards of rails are coloured bright red, and if needed, the winning post is made bigger.

Should this be implemented, then it would go a long way towards removing the grey area that is currently in place. Jockeys easing up and losing races at the moment, are able to blame the fact they’ve mistaken the winning post because they are similar.

A change to something completely different, a colour not used anywhere else on the racecourse, would mean that jockeys can no longer excuse two white poles that look similar when you’re glancing up as you ride out.

To use the same example as above, if the winning post was bright red, and that was the only time red was used on a racecourse, the excuse of mistaking it for a white pole before the line isn’t really there anymore.

We’ve seen a jockey ease up early in error, thinking they’d won a race, with Alec Voikhansky banned for 28 days after doing that at Bath recently. This is a different type of error, a personal one, where the jockey thought he’d won, tried to ease down early, and was caught.

This is something we don’t want to see in racing, and by changing the winning post, it takes away a potential escape route for jockeys that have done wrong like Alec did in this instance.