Hovdey: Whipping’s gray area

Nearing the end of the 1979 Grand Prix de Deauville, while giving chase to First Prayer aboard African Hope, Lester Piggott blew his stick. It happens, even to the best of them, but Piggott wasn’t about to give up. With exquisite timing, he reached out with his right hand and snatched the whip from the left hand of Alain Lequeux, on Jean Loup. First Prayer won comfortably, while African Hope edged Jean Loup for second, after which Piggott returned the whip.

“He was beaten,” Piggott said later in an attempt to justify the pilfer, although French stewards were not amused. They demoted Piggott’s horse to third and gave the jockey a 20-day suspension.

In the 1993 Breeders’ Cup Distaff at Santa Anita Park, Eddie Delahoussaye and Hollywood Wildcat were locked in a thriller with Chris McCarron and Paseana deep in the stretch. Suddenly, Delahoussaye’s whip went flying, forcing him to resort to old-fashioned smacks of the hand and a bit more volume on his trademark “hunh-hunh-hunh” finishing grunts. Hollywood Wildcat won by a nose.

“I did not drop my whip,” Delahoussaye insists to this day. “When I looked over and saw it was McCarron, I threw it away. I knew I wouldn’t need it.”

Then there was the quiet weekday afternoon when Gary Stevens and Laffit Pincay hit the top of the stretch side by side with plenty left in the tank. Pincay looked over at his rival.

“No whips?” he said.

“No whips,” Stevens replied.

And so they rode on with Hall of Fame intensity, shoulders pumping, faces buried in mane, until the last few jumps, when Pincay pulled his stick and gave his mount two sharp cracks to win by a lip. Pincay’s explanation was simple.

“I couldn’t take the chance,” he said.

Victor Espinoza wasn’t taking any chances aboard American Pharoah with the Kentucky Derby at stake and a tenacious Firing Line digging in for the long haul down the stretch at Churchill Downs. Espinoza gave his colt a rat-a-tattooing reminiscent of the steady beat Calvin Borel applied to Rachel Alexandra to get the job done in the 2009 Woodward Stakes, and American Pharoah ended up draped in roses. This, after all, was the point of the exercise.

In the wake of the race, Espinoza has come under criticism for the number of times he used the whip, a figure ranging anywhere from 20 to 32 depending on whoever was counting the whaps, raps, smacks, and waves of the stick. This was an issue only because it was the Kentucky Derby, which 16 million people watched on NBC, although I’m guessing not many of them noticed or even pretended to care until the whip count was brought up in Derby postmortems.

The Churchill Downs stewards decided that the rider did nothing wrong, and Espinoza was unapologetic, which made sense because no apology was required. Jockeys are handed the whip and told to go win the race, only now it is in an atmosphere of ever-changing rules governing the use of the stick.

“I understand the concern,” Espinoza said this week before heading to Maryland for Saturday’s Preakness, in which American Pharoah will be favored to add the second jewel of the Triple Crown. “But I would never intentionally hurt any horse, or any animal. Anything I do on any horse I ride is to encourage them to go forward. You can’t do that if you hurt them.”

Jockeys can be forgiven if the messages are mixed. Here’s this, from a 2004 Daily Racing Form letter to the editor:

“...Victor Espinoza has only himself to blame for Southern Image’s defeat in the Stephen Foster Handicap,” the reader wrote. “A stretch battle was fought, and about 70 yards from the wire, Southern Image had actually regained the lead – thanks to strong left-handed whipping by Espinoza. At that point, he stopped whipping, though the horse was obviously responding to it. I believe he thought he had the race won and consequently relied on a strong hand ride to finish the race. I figure that lack of perseverance cost him the race, and it cost many folks like yours truly a pick four worth about $1,000 for a $2 wager.”

Delahoussaye spoke up for the rational viewpoint to which most racing insiders prescribe.

“The thing is, it’s not how many times you hit a horse,” Delahoussaye said. “It’s how you hit them and when. You can hit a horse only five times and cut him up bad, or you can hit him 20 times in the stretch, keeping in rhythm, and the horse will be fine. It’s up to the racing officials to know the difference between abuse and proper use.”

Still, the rational view does not seem to wash with the wider public, which tunes into racing only a few times a year. If racing’s officials decide that what they define as too much whipping looks bad for widespread consumption, then they must ban whipping completely because a little bit of whipping does not look any better. Whip abuse, for many, is like pornography. They can’t define it, but they know it when they see it.

“The other day I watched that movie ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’ ” Espinoza said, innocent of any irony. “I mean, he was abusing his girlfriend something terrible, whipping her, and it seems like everybody loves that movie. It was completely insane, sick.”

The whip, for a jockey, is just another tool of the trade, requiring sensible rules for its use. Espinoza was asked, in the wake of his movie experience, if he looked at his stick any differently.

“Absolutely,” he said, and left it at that.