Castillo suspended 20 days for whip snatching

Jockey Angel Castillo has been suspended 20 days and fined $1,500 for a Sept. 21 incident at Parx Racing in which he snatched a whip out of a fellow rider’s hand and used it to urge his mount on to a second-place finish, according to a ruling by the track’s stewards.

The highly unusual incident occurred in the fourth race at Parx that day after Castillo, riding Interchange, was closing in on Distant Thoughts, ridden by Pierre Hernandez-Ortega. Interchange later bore out into Distant Thoughts, causing Castillo to lose his whip, and the rider later ended up with the crop being used by Hernandez-Ortega.

While Castillo’s mount finished a close second in the race, Distant Thoughts finished a tiring sixth. Although stewards interviewed the riders after the race, neither horse was disqualified.

The ruling cited a regulation that states that a jockey “may not willfully touch or strike another jockey or the horse or the equipment of another jockey for the purpose of interfering with that horse or jockey.” The suspension is scheduled to begin Oct. 23 and run through Nov. 11, though Castillo has 10 days to appeal the ruling.

After the race, Castillo, through his agent, said that he “got tangled up” with Hernandez-Ortega when his mount closed on the other horse in the stretch. Castillo also said there was no communication between the two riders during the incident.

Following the race, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Horse Racing Commission, Walter Remmert, said he was going to assess whether the track’s stewards had erred when they decided not to disqualify Interchange. Remmert did not return phone calls on Wednesday seeking comment.

Remmert had said the stewards had concluded that the “horse did not do anything wrong,” and that the incident had been interpreted as a rider’s infraction, which is typically handled through the assessment of penalties after a hearing conducted with the stewards.