Jockey Graham Gibbons jailed after fourth drink-driving conviction

Jockey Graham Gibbons has been jailed after being convicted of drink-driving for the fourth time.

He was sent to prison for 16 weeks, disqualified from driving for 60 months and handed a victim surcharge of £150 in the case at Harrogate Magistrates Court last week.

Gibbons, who admitted to having an alcohol problem after being convicted of drink-driving for a third time in 2011, does not have a current riding licence but had reapplied for one following the end of his two-and-a-half year ban for testing positive for cocaine and coercing another jockey to swap urine samples with him.

He was suspended for six months for failing a drug test at Kempton on December 7, 2016, with a further two-year ban served from June 2017 for exchanging his urine sample with that of his weighing room colleague Callum Shepherd.

The BHA's disciplinary panel found Gibbons in breach of rule A(30), relating to conduct prejudicial to the integrity, proper conduct and/or good reputation of horseracing, in that he not only involved a younger rider in his actions, but also competed in a race knowing he was likely to fail a drug test.

Gibbons, who returned home to Ireland after his ban, had been preparing for a potential return to the course where he would have hoped to build on his tally of more than 1,050 career winners, the first of which was in 2000.

The 37-year-old, whose biggest win came in the Group 2 Gimcrack Stakes on the William Haggas-trained Ajaya in 2015, has been riding out for David Barron, and the North Yorkshire trainer said: "He'd been here once or twice a week, sometimes more than that depending on whether we needed him. That's been going on since the start of the year and he could have race-ridden tomorrow.

"It's an awful shame because he's a very talented lad but he has a problem that he struggles with. He has a tremendous amount of ability but it's an illness and he needs help."

In 2007 Gibbons became the first jockey in Britain to be found over the drink-drive limit when breathalysed on the racecourse, and received a 35-day riding ban.

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