This week has shown why self-policing weighing room culture needs to change

I have a shy person's aversion to getting naked in front of, well, very nearly everyone else, so the weighing room never seemed like the ideal workplace for me, even if there had ever been the remotest possibility of my earning a living in the saddle.

I grew up reading books like the one in which the late Ginger McCain described it as "a man's domain . . . You had that smell of men's bodies, sweaty and masculine. The toilet was a bucket in the corner that never got emptied until it was full". Hmm, brilliant, where do I sign?

But many jockeys, especially the well-established names, speak in glowing terms of what it's like to spend much of your day in the weighing room, and we heard from a few of them this summer and autumn in the build-up to this week's bullying hearing. For them, it is the place where they feel most at home, where they revel in the company of like-minded colleagues and rivals, where they feel supported and understood.