JAMIE Powell is grateful to those who stood by him and gave him support in the month between being disqualified from first place in the Cesarewitch at Newmarket and being reinstated as the winner of the £90,000 race this week.

Champion apprentice in 2023 with 28 winners, the 22-year-old jockey has had a hard year, with just seven winners at home to-date. Winning the Cesarewitch on 33/1 shot Alphonse Le Grande in October appeared to save his season only for it to be taken away in a high-profile British Horseracing Authority hearing which left Powell with a 28-day ban.

Powell was adjudged to have used his whip 10 times on the Cathy O’Leary-trained winner. British racing rules allow jockeys to use their whip a maximum of six times in a flat race. Penalties increase for every additional use, with the threat of disqualification if the whip is used 10 times or more.

The Whip Review Committee duly disqualified Alphonse Le Grande three days after the race, prompting connections to lodge an appeal which was heard this week and was successful.

Powell told The Irish Field: “We were hopeful going over and we got a very fair hearing. It lasted three-to-four hours and I gave evidence myself. It was all very formal with several solicitors involved.”

The independent BHA disciplinary panel found that one of Powell’s strikes was not intentional, as he made contact with the horse while moving his whip from one hand to the other. As a result the disqualification was reversed and Powell’s 28-day ban reduced to 20 days.

“I have actually served the ban already so I will be back riding at Dundalk next Friday,” Powell said. “I am going to stick around for the winter season, continue riding out for Johnny Murtagh and Noel Meade, and hopefully make a fresh start to 2025.

“It had been a very quiet year which came as a bit of a shock to me following the previous season. The Cesarewitch win seemed like the light at the end of the tunnel so to lose it was sickening. But I have had plenty of ups and downs already in my career and all of this will only be to my benefit in the long run.

“After the disqualification I got a bit of abuse from punters [who backed the runner-up and were not paid out] but everyone around me was very supportive and knew what I was going through, so I had plenty of people to talk to if I needed them.”

Panel reasoning

Explaining the panel’s reasoning for its decision, panel chair Sarah Crowther KC said: “We find that his [Powell’s] body position was different to the first nine strikes, it seems to us that he was somewhat crouched and off balance to his left and very low in the saddle.

“Whilst his arm and hand were in the same angle as the previous strikes, the change in body position and the different stride of the horse had the effect of changing the angle of the strike.

“It was common ground, that as Mr Powell retrieved his whip from that strike on the way back, pulling it back towards his right-hand side and bringing it forward, there was contact. It seemed to us the question for us was whether that contact constituted use of the whip.”

She went on: “Adopting a pragmatic interpretation of the word ‘use’ in context of the rules as a whole and from our experience of panel of racing, we find it is not every single contact between a whip and a horse that will amount to a use.

“We do find this is a fact-sensitive question and specifically on the facts of this case we find the contact was made in circumstances where Mr Powell was retrieving his stick from the wrong side of the horse and it was effectively an unavoidable contact which could not have had any material impact on the performance of the horse.

“Therefore we find that in total there were nine uses, three above the permitted level, the horse will be reinstated and the suspension will be 20 days.”