DO we forgive sporting legends too easily in this country?
Here’s the story of Damien Oliver to help you decide. Oliver, 42, is the three-time Melbourne-Cup winning jockey who rode last year’s winner Fiorente. He’s riding Irish stayer Mutual Regard in this year’s Melbourne Cup too.
Two years ago, Oliver admitted to doing just about the worst thing in racing, yet was allowed back into the saddle within months. We’ve broken his story into 24 easily digestible points, one for each Melbourne Cup runner, and we welcome your comments below.
1. Damien Oliver, by any measure, is one of Australia’s greatest ever jockeys. He’s won three Melbourne Cups, plus every big race worth winning. And he’s been doing it for more than 20 years
2. Oliver transcended the line from top sportsman to national hero when in 2002, he rode Media Puzzle to victory in the Melbourne Cup just days after his brother Jason, also a jockey, died after a fall from a horse in Perth. Oliver cried after the race. A nation cried with him.
3. The story was so moving they made a movie about it called The Cup, which came out a couple of years ago. It was a little cheesy but was far from the worst movie ever. They haven’t made a movie about the shocking thing Oliver did 10 years later. But if they did, it’d have a very, very different tone.
4. What happened was, Oliver bet $10,000 on a horse. This was naughty for all sorts of reasons but mostly because jockeys are not allow to bet. At all. Not even a dollar.
5. And jockeys definitely, DEFINITELY can’t bet on a different horse to the one they’re riding in a race. Because obviously, that would make you think they don’t want their own horse to win, right? Right.
6. But that’s what Ollie did. As he admitted to stewards during the 2012 spring carnival, he put a lazy $10k on a horse called Miss Octopussy, which won a relatively minor race. Oliver rode a horse called Europa Point in the same race. It didn’t win although he said he had tried really hard on Europa Point.
7. Oliver said he was going through a stressful time and a marriage breakup when he placed the infringing bet. “The loss and loneliness had even taken away my own self belief,” he told the media. The correlation between his loss of “self-belief” and his desire for a quick illicit earn on the punt remains unclear to many.
8. When these revelations first became public during the 2012 Spring Carnival, it was huge news. Victorian racing stewards, who protect the integrity of the sport, had the formal option of standing Oliver down before formal charges were laid by stewards.
9. Did they exercise this option? No they did not. Racing Victoria Limited (RVL) left Oliver free to ride throughout the lucrative spring carnival.
Here’s what Racing Integrity Commissioner Sal Perna had to say about that decision in his official report published after the affair:
“In my examination of the information, I am of the view that the decision taken not to [stand the jockey down] until Oliver made admissions was too conservative and cautious in the circumstances. Such view is not shared by RVL.”
10. Senior racing media figures saw things the way Sal Perna did. Here’s what broadcaster Gerard Whateley, who penned the excellent book on Black Caviar, said on the eve of the 2012 Melbourne Cup, in which Oliver rode Americain, the 3rd favourite and 2010 winner, to 11th place.
“If Damien Oliver has admitted to placing an illegal bet to Racing Victoria officials and they have delayed justice to allow the Melbourne Cup to run with Oliver’s participation, then they’re going to have something to answer for. It’s one thing not to have got to the end of an inquiry by this stage… but if he’s admitted his guilt, I find it very difficult to imagine why action hasn’t been expedited.”
11. Meanwhile Patrick Smith of The Australian wrote:
“I think it’s very obvious that it compromises the sport and I think it’s very, very disappointing the way that Racing Victoria and the stewards and have handled the case.”
12. As Melbourne Cup day 2012 loomed, some owners of Spring Carnival horses started to sack Oliver from their mounts. They were concerned both about his integrity and his state of mind (and therefore his ability to ride well) while the allegations and admissions were flying.
HALF-TIME SUMMARY
If you’ve just been scrolling down the page looking at the pics, here’s what you need to know: Australia’s best jockey placed an enormous illegal bet on a different horse to the one he was riding. The immediate reaction of racing authorities was to do nothing. Here’s what happened next.
13. Francesca Cumani, the glamorous TV personality and daughter of leading European trainer Luca Cumani, revealed on a Channel Seven panel discussion on Melbourne Cup morning that a member of her racing team had asked Oliver if he could deny the allegations. He could not, and was thus relieved of his rides for the Cumani stable.
14. Something else very interesting happened on the panel that morning. Racing expert Richard Freedman was on the panel. He is a longtime friend of Oliver, and is also the brother of Melbourne Cup-winning trainer Lee Freedman, whose horse, Doriemus, Oliver rode to his first Melbourne Cup win in 1995.
“That’s a serious charge and if he’s found guilty, it’ll be a serious penalty, it could end his career,” Freedman said.
(For the record, Europa Point was also a Lee Freedman horse, and both Lee and Richard Freedman believe Oliver gave it every chance even though it was soundly beaten by Miss Octopussy.)
15. Freedman repeated the phrase “end his career” several times throughout the course of his 90 second statement on live television. It suggested in super clear terms that if Oliver was found guilty, he would be in for a long and possibly career-ending suspension.
16. So what happened? The inquiry unfolded and Oliver got eight months. Yes, just eight months. He was back in time for the whole of the next Spring, and to ride Fiorente to victory for Gai Waterhouse in the 2013 Melbourne Cup.
17. Remember, jockeys can’t bet at all. Remember that jockeys are bound by the rules of racing to give their mount every chance. And while Oliver bet $10,000 on a rival, no one has proven he didn’t ride his hardest on his hopelessly beaten horse Europa Point.
18. Here’s some perspective on Oliver’s penalty. In 2010, the AFL suspended a bunch of officials who had placed minuscule bets on footy. Unlike Oliver, these bets were mostly unrelated to matches in which they officiated or participated. For example, an interchange steward was ousted for almost a whole season for placing four bets totalling a paltry $9.
The AFL’s action in setting a brutal example was described as “sledgehammer-to-crack-a-walnut” tactics.
19. Damien Oliver bet 1,100 times what the AFL steward bet, he did it in one hit, in an event in which he was directly involved, yet received a similar penalty. To most observers, it looked about as effective as a toothpick-to-a-walnut.
Also this year, veteran New Zealand jockey called David Walker bet on a rival horse and was ousted for seven years. Although he was found to have not given his horse every chance to win (ulinke Oliver, who did), many still felt this was the sort of penalty Oliver deserved.
Among those people were former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett, who said: “The Walker sentence is exactly the right justice and shows New Zealand got it right and we got it very wrong with Oliver”.
20. In Hong Kong and many other racing jurisdictions around the world, it’s possible Damien Oliver would have spent time in jail and/or been outed for life.
21. On Damien Oliver’s Wikipedia page, you will find no mention of the tawdry Miss Octopussy affair. The man clearly has fans. Fans who can edit Wikipedia.
22. To get to the bottom of all this, we made two quick phone calls. One was to Richard Freedman, to see if he was surprised that the Oliver penalty turned out to be a long way from the “career ender” he predicted. Richard told us that the stewards had a very difficult case to prove, that they knew Oliver had the wherewithal to fight it every step of the way, and that the guilty plea basically came after the penalty was agreed. In other words, it was a plea bargain.
Freedman also told us that “Damien wouldn’t be the first leading jockey to have backed a horse in a race”.
23. As an interesting and humorous aside to that comment, Sydney racing media personality Richard Callander was addressing a function around the time of this scandal. With Oliver having claimed that this was the only bet he’d ever placed, Callander pointed out that Oliver was incredibly lucky to have won so much money with his first ever bet on a horse!
24. And the second person we contacted? That would be chief NSW racing steward Ray Murrihy. We rang him because we thought it would be head-against-brick-wall stuff contacting the Victorian mob.
Well, it was head-against-brick-wall stuff with Ray Murrihy too, who was unwilling to besmirch his southern counterparts.
“I don’t want to put my head in that scrum. I’m very much in a glass house and I’ve been in it for 45 years,” Murrihy diplomatically told news.com.au.
Mr Murrihy did, however, helpfully point us in the direction of a recent case involving two jockeys licensed in NSW, Peter Robl and (another former Melbourne Cup winner) Blake Shinn, who each received 12 month suspensions for a series of much smaller bets (Robl was backing himself while Shinn backed himself in all of his bets bar one).
Mr Murrihy also told us that new rules have come in which give stewards a broader discretion to deal more harshly with issues like the Oliver case.
Here’s hoping Oliver never does anything half as foolish ever again. Jockeys shouldn’t be taking people for a ride. That’s the job of horses.
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