THE flat season has really delivered this summer, I must admit, and while it’s easy to wax lyrical about City Of Troy and Calandagan serving up a superb spectacle in the Juddmonte International, the highlight of the week for me and many others was the success of Pat O’Donnell’s Extensio in the two mile handicap on Wednesday and the interview he gave Lydia Hislop on Racing TV afterwards, one which the presenter herself immediately reposted on X with the header *new favourite interview*.

The story of Extensio has all the romance that tends to set jump racing apart from the glitz and glamour of the flat. It’s often said that the beauty of jump racing, especially in Ireland, is that the dream of glory is open to absolutely everyone and that champions can come in all sorts of packaging. Sometimes, however, the little man also makes a splash in the rich man’s preserve, and the rags-to-riches stories that come out of the summer game are all the more poignant for their scarcity.

So it is for Extensio, who was picked up fortuitously and for “less than the €800 minimum bid” when led out unsold as a yearling at Goffs. For a man whose most famous victory came with a horse called Chance Coffey, it’s somewhat ironic that he picked up the horse of a lifetime having left the house that morning to buy nothing more exotic than tea bags.

The fairytale begins, then, and the fact that Extensio is owned by O’Donnell’s wife Úna and was led up by daughter Sylvia (who rode the gelding to victory in the Ladies Derby at the Curragh last year) just adds to the romance. It helps that O’Donnell has that archetypal twinkle in his eye, and it was impossible not to get swept along with the story as he spoke afterwards, his sheer enthusiasm and love for the occasion proving irresistible.

The Herbertstown handler has tasted success at the Cheltenham Festival when his father’s Chance Coffey took the Coral Cup in 1995, but while that victory and the subsequent celebrations have been relived many times, O’Donnell and family are clearly relishing the present with Extensio, and an entry in the Cesarewitch at Newmarket in October means we might get to see plenty more of the bonny Extensio on ITV screens.

WHAT is it about Kempton and judging/stewarding mistakes? The track has quite the chequered history when it comes to getting simple decisions wrong, with perhaps the most famous being the incident involving “Calamity Jane” Stickels and the Captain Quist Hurdle in 1994.

Stickels took 20 minutes to try to separate Large Action and Absalom’s Lady before declaring dead-heat. When the photo-finish print was put on display, the latter’s owner Peter Bolton needed just one look to determine that his grey mare had put her nose in front where it mattered.

“I think my horse has won that,” he suggested to Mrs Stickels, who belatedly amended the result, but not before another two races had been run. Presumably, she’s spent that crucial 20 minutes with her hat over her eyes.

“Lessons will be learnt,” said a spokesman for the Jockey Club, and their successors have been telling us that lessons will be learnt at regular intervals since, but I don’t see any improvement. Since 2013, you may be shocked to learn, the Kempton judge has called the wrong winner in a photo-finish five times. Once is unfortunate, as readers of Oscar Wilde will be aware, but five times? That’s well beyond careless.

I say five, although the official line is that only Proclaimer, Bird For Life, Loving Glance, and Fire Fighting have been declared winners in error having been beaten in photographs at the track in that timeframe, but that quartet will soon be joined by Flavour Maker, adjudged to have dead-heated for first at the track earlier in the week.

I should clarify that this is conjecture on my part at this stage, but it seems clear enough from the official RaceTech photograph of the Try Unibet’s Improved Bet Builder Handicap that Flavour Maker just failed to get up, and that Thorntonledale Max should have been declared the outright winner.

If my opinion (and that of Callum Shepherd, who rode Thorntonledale Max) is correct, then it will have far-reaching consequences, as Shepherd was controversially banned for 18 days for failing to ride out to achieve the best possible placing. It’s true that the jockey stopped riding a few yards from the post, but replays of the finish do not suggest that his mount lost any momentum, and he appears to hold on narrowly for all the Kempton angle can be deceptive. Timeform’s race report agrees regarding Shepherd’s riding, but their reporter makes no comment about the photo.

If, as I believe, Thorntonledale Max was first past the post, then any censure of the jockey will be null and void and I hope that connections query the result of the race in the first instance rather than complaining by comparing the punishment with a similar event at Windsor on Monday when James Doyle eased up close home on No Retreat and was caught and passed on the line. Doyle escaped any penalty when claiming that his mount jinked close home, causing him to become unbalanced, an explanation which was debunked by former champion jockey turned pundit Seb Sanders in the Sky Sports Racing studio.

It’s true that Doyle’s actions seem more likely to have lost the race than Shepherd’s, but it would be dangerous for the latter to base his appeal on the interpretation of a different incident, and the best course of action is to concentrate on the veracity of the photo finish.