Sean Levey to miss Ebor meeting after appeal against ban fails

A determined appeal on behalf of Sean Levey has failed to persuade a disciplinary panel that he was not guilty of improper riding at Glorious Goodwood last month and the jockey will have to serve the six-day ban imposed by the raceday stewards, ruling him out of next week's Ebor meeting.

Rory Mac Neice, Levey's solicitor, claimed it would be "astonishingly harsh" to punish the jockey for taking evasive action from behind a wall of horses and Levey was backed up by fellow rider Hollie Doyle, who suffered interference as a result of his actions.

But the panel chair, David Fish QC, told Levey: "We take the view you ought reasonably to have known that riding in that manner on that racecourse, interference would be the result. There were 13 runners in this race, you were in the middle of the field with horses around you, and towards the front, and you did not look at all, at any stage, to check the position of horses that were in the race."

Riding Ardbraccan in the nursery won by Aswan, Levey found a gap closing as he sought to move into it. He switched left, interfering with Doyle on Aldbourne. Ardbraccan finished fifth while Aldbourne rallied to be a length behind the filly in seventh, just a nose behind Adjuvant in sixth.

Levey said he had had to act quickly to avoid clipping the heels of those in front of him. "Once the horse came and took that gap off me, it happened in a split second," he told the panel. "All I could do was concentrate on the issue that presented itself in front of me. I went left because the horses I was checking off were going to the right."

Levey picked up the ban in a nursery at Glorious GoodwoodCredit: Edward Whitaker

Under cross-examination from the BHA's Louis Weston, Levey accepted he could see only seven of his 12 rivals at the time of making the manoeuvre and did not know where the other five were but argued he did not have time to look.

Asked for her view, Doyle said: "Mr Levey was left with no option but to switch off heels, otherwise there would have been a further incident."

She repeatedly declined to criticise him, instead referring to herself as "stupid" for not calling out to alert Levey to her presence. She added that her horse was "green and dumb" and not going so well as Levey's, said the impact on her was limited to one stride and insisted she was never afraid of clipping heels.

"From a jockey's point of view, when someone's going better than you, I almost moved my horse's head to almost let Sean go, really," Doyle said.

Weston said the BHA did not accept Doyle's account, describing it as being "constantly and deliberately exculpatory of Mr Levey". Fish noted that jockeys defending other jockeys was "not an unusual feature of some of these cases".

Hollie Doyle: her account of the incident was not accepted by the BHACredit: Alan Crowhurst (Getty Images)

"I appreciate that," Weston said, "and I'm not here to try to come to the bottom of what is a long history. I understand the realpolitik. But the evidence she has given is at an unattractive distance from what is seen on the video."

Defending Levey, Mac Neice argued: "He has to take immediate action to avoid clipping heels. He has less than one second to decide how to do that. He goes left and backwards. That was his only viable option from his position.

"These are really tight margins. What time was available to him, to take the steps, to make the analysis? That dose of reality is important and that's how Miss Doyle approached her evidence, with a helpful injection of reality, of what it's like on the ground, to be riding horses at 35mph at Goodwood.

"He had no time to obtain the knowledge the BHA says should have furnished his decision-making. He didn't know where Miss Doyle was."

But, fatally for his appeal, Levey agreed with Weston that he would have been unable to move left if there had been a horse directly to his outside and would have had to take alternative action. "We take the view that you could have done something else in the circumstances of this case," Fish told him.

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