As the French are showing: a direct approach to whip rules is the only road to take

I've always liked the way the French go about solving problems. You notice it when you drive over there.

When we have a car accident on a busy road in Britain, we close the whole thing in both directions while we hold a three-hour multi-jurisdictional conference. The French treat it as a roundabout until they can shunt it out of the way with a tractor. It seems to be much the same with racing regulation, if recent events are anything to go by.

We're back to the old chestnut of the whip. Over here, we've been tying ourselves up in knots for years, working out how to deal with situations where jockeys infringe the whip regulations to win a race. We come up with a 'number of strikes' rule and then we can't quite bring ourselves to enforce it properly by disqualification. Or so it was until this year. Now jockeys riding in Britain are aware if they use their whip four times over prescribed limits - six on the Flat and seven over jumps - they face disqualification.