The Tony Martin saga is an embarrassment to racing - but it's the rules that need clarifying if we don't want it to happen again

How lucky is horseracing that the wider world has plenty with which to occupy itself just now? What with the election in the UK and numerous other stories of significant gravity, the eyes of outsiders are not being cast in the direction of our little world and for once we can indulge in a sigh of relief about that.

If this were the silly season of mid-August, with non-sports reporters desperate to sink their teeth into a meaty news story, some hard-bitten hack might easily have picked up on the tale of the trainer who was suspended but turned up to accept a trophy anyway. Whatever we might think of the reality of the situation, it would be so easy to present it as a case of someone who was supposedly punished but in reality suffered very little hindrance.

As it turned out, Tony Martin's presence at Newcastle on Saturday resulted in just one report that I noticed outside the ordinary confines of racing-related media. It could have been so much worse, bearing in mind that Martin's offence was for breach of the anti-doping rules, a subject closely connected with the issue of animal welfare.