When is a suspension not a suspension?

Am I the only person who found Vince 'Smudger' Smith's double at Kempton today slightly odd? Both winners were horses having their first runs from the stable, having been transferred from Michael Wigham's stable (and that's assuming that they have actually moved to Vince's premises) presumably within the last few days in the aftermath of Michael having just been handed his 20,000-pound (I don't seem to be able to get the sign for pounds to work on this new computer, hence my writing out the word) fine and his however many days' suspension. For sure there is nothing to stop Michael's owners transferring their horses to another trainer while he is on the sidelines, but one of the horses ran in Michael's own colours; doesn't that suggest that his suspension is not much of a suspension at all? Obviously the financial punishment is hefty, but otherwise it seems as if the punishment is more theoretical than practical, if Michael can even continue to run his own horses in his own colours while serving a suspension for, unless I misread the charge, being found guilty of deliberately instructing his jockey not to win a race (yet again) which is an offence for being found guilty of which, to my mind, one should be warned off for a long period.

What we now probably face is the infamous Baytown Blaze running for her sixth trainer within a year. (She has already run for Phil McEntee, John Ryan, Kirsty Boutflower, Giles Bravery and Michael Wigham, racing in the same colours throughout, within the last ten months). Of course she would only have run under the name of Phil McEntee (who seems always to be there to welcome her back to the unsaddling enclosure on behalf of whichever trainer is being kind enough to take responsibility for her and Phil at that particular time) were it not for the fact that he's currently serving a suspension for whatever it was that he it was he was found guilty of. But now she'll have to run for someone else - presumably Vince - and that should happen soon, because she hasn't run for nearly two weeks so must be due another outing any day now. So will this be some sort of record: a horse remaining in the same ownership but having six different trainers in less than a year?

Before the HRA thought-police decide that I'm having a go at them here - and yes, I do believe that justice isn't being done - I must say that I understand that it isn't the HRA's fault; rather it is the fault of the modern-day philosophy, which has basically caused the whole operation of the law in Europe to be overhauled, that nobody should ever have to take responsibility for their own misdemeanours, for many reasons, not least the fact that asking people to accept the consequences of their wrong-doing is an 'infringement of their civil liberties'. I actually have every sympathy for the HRA Disciplinary Department, which faces the Hobson's Choice whenever forced upon the task of trying to crack down on corruption of either taking the pragmatic option of doing very little and, if handing out punishments at all, handing out ones which are so disproportionately small that the recipients are going to take them more or less on the chin (not that anyone ever really does such a thing nowadays) or wasteing millions of pounds of racing's already-overstretched funds in unwinnable lawsuits as the guilty parties pay their lawyers to prepare appeals to the European Court Of Human Rights.

But one can't help comparing and contrasting with the suspensions handed out today to the poor apprentices who made the blunder of allowing one rider on an outsider far too much rope in the first race at Kempton this afternoon. I'm very dubious of the concept of giving jockeys suspensions for making honest mistakes during races, because if one goes down that road, where will it end? Was Paul Carberry suspended for his ride on Psycho in the County Hurdle? If the apprentices aren't good enough to have licenses, then take their licenses away until they have satisfied the licensing committee that they have improved; but if they retain their licenses, what is the logic for their being penalized for a mid-race misjudgement (unless, of course, it was felt that they all deliberately rode to get their mounts beaten) when such errors are a daily and unpunished occurence? I suppose that the logic is that they will be more likely to learn from their mistakes if they are officially punished for them, but surely the shame, the dressing-down they will have received from the horses' connections - and from the stewards - and the scorn of the press and the public would have been enough to make them acutely aware of the severity of their misjudgements and to ponder thereon.

Where is this particular tangent heading? I don't know. I just feel that at Kempton this afternoon, when we have had Michael Wigham (presumably) standing on a dais accepting a trophy and three young apprentices copping lengthy suspensions for innocent mistakes which would have had them hanging their heads in shame anyway, natural justice wasn't really working.