PUNTERS WANT NO MERCY

FERGAL LYNCH this week agreed to pay a £50,000 fine having admitted stopping Bond City at Thirsk in August 2004.

It was a plea bargain that has provoked widespread astonishment. The jockey's deal with the British Horseracing Authority also stipulates he will not apply for a licence to ride in the UK for 12 months.

Amazingly the BHA will raise no objection to disgraced Lynch riding abroad - and he is currently doing very nicely in the USA having partnered 92 winners for a total of $2.4million prize money this year.

While this has been a complicated case which gave rise to some mitigating circumstances, on-course reaction this week was that Lynch, having confessed to the greatest offence a jockey can commit, had got the best of the deal.

One senior jockey told me: "After years of waiting for a jockey who has definitely stopped one, the authorities let him ride anywhere he fancies except this country. What does that make them look like?"

To be fair to the BHA they admit Lynch has 'got off pretty lightly'.

And the general assumption is that as part of his deal Lynch must have given the BHA information that is going to be of use to them in wider enquiries.

BHA spokesman Paul Struthers said: "When you look at the serious nature of what he has pleaded guilty to, I have sympathy with the view that a £50,000 fine is not fitting."

Two important things emerge from this shabby saga. First Lynch's admission he stopped a horse damns the twaddle peddled to punters that there is no such thing as a bent jockey. They are genuinely rare but exist and are hugely damaging to their fellow riders.

Secondly it is clear the BHA remains utterly committed to rooting out corruption and that Lynch's weedy sentence marks an entry point for future punishment. Punters expect this war to be waged constantly, fairly with little mercy.

Read Alastair Down in the Racing Post every week

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