Chop off their hands or slap their wrists – the difficult choice facing the BHA

Justice is a funny old game, isn’t it? Sometimes it’s only an accident of geography that decides whether you’re going to get your hands chopped off or receive a conditional discharge with a spot of professional counselling thrown in.

In sport the lines are equally blurred, as much by public adulation as by the law. Bite a fellow professional in the course of your footballing duties and people will fall over themselves to employ you; do it in a newspaper office and you may never work again (although this is a theory I have yet to test out).

Racing has been testing its own boundaries in 2017. We revisited our attitude to drug offences: when one of Philip Hobbs’s runners tested positive for a prohibited substance the trainer was let off without a dent in his bank balance or a stain on his reputation, a ruling upheld despite a BHA appeal against the decision of its independent panel.