Racing chiefs must ban Oisin Murphy immediately after drink-drive conviction

Daily Mirror

5 days ago

Chief racing correspondent David Yates, aka Newsboy, urges the BHA to do its job in the wake of the four-time champion jockey's appearance at Reading Magistrates Court
Everyone is equal before the law - a fundamental legal principle that, in theory, applies equally to both Oisín Murphy and a chalk jockey who has ridden a mere handful of winners. Now it's up to the British Horseracing Authority to apply it.
Murphy is in the very elite category of Flat jockeys. He's won four championships and will very likely capture a fifth if the BHA allows the 29-year-old to carry on riding after his conviction for drink driving at Reading Magistrates Courts last Thursday.
‌
Murphy, who was banned from driving for 20 months and fined £70,000, also rides for some of British racing's most powerful players.
‌
We are not yet at the halfway point of the 2025 Flat season, but Murphy has won Group races in Britain carrying the colours of Juddmonte, Sheikh Ahmed Al Maktoum, Prince AA Faisal, King Power Racing and Jeff Smith, on horses trained by Andrew Balding, John and Thady Gosden, André Fabre and Ed Walker.
So the British Horseracing Authority will need to stand up to - or at least inconvenience - some of the sport's biggest names if it revokes Murphy's licence to ride. But it has no choice but to do exactly that.
Murphy's previous brushes with racing authority are well chronicled. Banned for three months by French regulator France Galop in November 2020 after testing positive for cocaine, the Irishman was stood down from riding at Newmarket the following October thanks to a failed breath test, hours after reportedly being involved in a fracas in one of the town's pubs.
‌
The latter offence - the breath test, not the incident in the pub - and an identical transgression at Chester in May 2021 were also on the rap sheet when Murphy appeared before the BHA in February 2022 to face a charge of misleading its officials over his holiday destination during the COVID-19 pandemic in September 2020.
A disciplinary panel found he had lied about his whereabouts in that Murphy had been in Mykonos - at the time Greece was on the government's COVID 'red' list of countries - while claiming to have been in Lake Garda, Italy, which was not.
‌
The panel handed down a 14-month ban, of which the relevant part to last Thursday's court case relates to the additional conditions attached Murphy's licence when he returned to race-riding in February 2023.
The BHA didn't make the details public, but stated they 'include the need for Mr Murphy to remain sober and avoid the use of any illicit substances or social drugs'.
‌
The phrase about remaining sober is a woolly one, and no figures were published in terms of micrograms of alcohol per millilitres of breath to set a bar for the increased testing Murphy faced. But there's no need for any numbers, given the information put before district judge Sam Goozee in court last week.
We learned, and it seems the BHA learned at exactly the same time, that Murphy, who courtesy of 'a misunderstanding' did not provide a roadside sample to police officers after driving a Mercedes A Class into a tree in the early hours of April 27, was tested at 7am that day.
The reading showed he had 66 micrograms of alcohol per 100 millilitres of breath. The legal limit is 35 so, seven hours after the crash - and just under eight hours before the start of Southwell's card on which he was booked for four mounts - Murphy, who didn't make it to Nottinghamshire, was still almost twice over the limit.
‌
Factor in that the threshold for jockeys is 17mcg per 100ml of breath and Murphy was four times over the riding limit that morning.
There's no precise formula to work out how quickly alcohol leaves the system - it depends, among other things, on the metabolism and size of the person in question.
‌
But the very notion that Murphy, four times over the riding limit on the morning of four booked rides, was not in egregious breach of the BHA requirement to 'remain sober' is laughable.
The BHA would be failing in its regulatory duties if it didn't revoke a jockey's licence in such circumstances, and that applies just as equally to a rider of Murphy's status as one significantly lower down the food chain.
Such an omission would place in danger every other jockey, and every horse, taking part in a race. The life-changing injuries suffered by Freddy Tylicki at Kempton Park in October 2016 give all too stark an illustration of how tragically this can play out.
In the wake of Thursday's case, a 'disappointed' BHA, while permitting Murphy to carry on riding, said: 'His conduct fell a long way short of the standard we expect of all licensed individuals, in whom we place trust that they will represent our sport to the best of their abilities, upholding our collective reputation and ensuring racing is a safe place for all.'
Words are all very well. Now is the time for action.