CAS – Agreed re number of strikes, it was always a slippery slope once that came into play especially in NH races.
You can easily not go above the permitted number of strikes and still give a horse a harder time than somebody who has gone over the number but used it in a more judicious way (i.e. four or five times where they have used it once or twice before putting it down and reverting to hands and heels etc).
I remember back when it came in (on the first Champions Day where Soumillon got done on Cirrus des Aigles if memory serves) they were at pains to state that if you exceeded the number of strikes it would simply trigger a Stewards Enquiry to look into the ride and not automatically result in a jockey being banned………I guess that part of the rule went out the window pretty quickly.
I still think it is a sad state of affairs to where Stewards are now clearly having to review replays specifically to count the number of strikes a jockey has and in a great number of cases where bans are handed out, if you weren’t counting, you would be hard pressed to say that a jockey has overused the whip…..obviously there are cases where you can see they have but I would imagine they are in the minority overall.