This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Oisin Murphy is one of the greatest jockeys of his generation. A four-time — and current — champion flat jockey, he is one of the select group genuinely deserving of the label “world class”.
He is also, to be blunt, a wrong ’un. On 3 July he was convicted of drink-driving after a session which must have also been world class. When he was tested seven hours after a crash which, miraculously, somehow didn’t seriously injure himself or his passenger, he was still nearly double the legal limit of 35 micrograms of alcohol per 100ml of breath.
I tell you this not only to berate Murphy — although anyone as reckless to other people’s safety deserves all the berating going — but because of the light it throws on racing.
RacingTV, in many ways a model of its kind with serious, informed coverage, discussed Murphy on its Sunday morning discussion programme. The panellists included trainer George Baker and stud farm owner Jayne McGivern. Baker told the show that, “The key here is that Oisin is a great guy. I get on very well with him, as a sport we love him … He’s had a lot of chances and please God the sport gives him many more.”
Murphy is a veritable pillar of the racing community and George gets on well with Oisin, so yah boo sucks to anyone who thinks it matters that he was done for drink-driving. As for having had a lot of chances: you can say that again. If this had been Murphy’s first offence, one might consider it a stupid mistake. But he is not so much a repeat as an inveterate offender.
In June 2019 Murphy tested over the race riding limit for alcohol (although under the driving limit). He was banned for a day. A whole day. The following year he tested positive for cocaine whilst riding in France and was given a three-month ban — half the usual penalty, after successfully putting forward the explanation that it was a result of “environmental contamination” following sexual contact with a cocaine user.
The year after that he was banned for 14 months after admitting serious breaches of Covid protocols, misleading British Horseracing Authority officials and failing two breath tests for alcohol before racing. As the chair of the panel put it: “We conclude you thought you were above the rules and the law. All you had to do was self-isolate as countless others had to do, but you embarked on a deception that was planned, carefully calculated and detailed and it was prolonged for a significant period of time.”
So yes, Murphy has indeed had a lot of chances, although indulgencies would be a more appropriate word. But Baker’s view that this is a good thing, rather than an illustration of how racing protects its own, shows how far removed the sport places itself from the rest of the world.
Murphy has been handed still more indulgencies, despite his offences now being criminal rather than merely a breach of racing’s rules. He was allowed to resume riding within 48 hours of his car crash. And following his conviction on 3 July he was back riding the very next day in a prestigious race at Saratoga in New York, then at Sandown the day after.
But George Baker was coruscating compared with stud farm owner Jayne McGivern. She concurred with Baker that “Oisin is a wonderful guy. He is an absolute superstar,” adding, “We all ought to have a little bit of understanding and empathy around this case for him.” Poor Oisin is obviously the real victim in this.
But how’s this for a clincher? “On top of anything else it didn’t happen on a racecourse and wasn’t anywhere near a horse. This is his private life and it’s nothing really to do with us or anybody else.” If only his barrister had come up with that as a plea in mitigation: it didn’t happen on a racecourse and he wasn’t near a horse.
This reaction from within racing exemplifies not just why it is heading towards collapse — it has no grasp of how it is perceived in the real world — but why it almost deserves to collapse. It’s the latest example of how the sport closes ranks against anyone or anything deemed an outsider — including the criminal law. Murphy is a good chap, one of our own, and so he is rallied round.
But if you cause trouble you’re on your own, as the brilliant female jockey Bryony Frost found out when she reported bullying by fellow jockey Robbie Dunne and was effectively drummed out of the sport and forced to move to France to get rides. Her own union, the Professional Jockeys Association, ignored her. Eventually, after a two-year campaign and media pressure, the British Horse Racing Authority acted and Dunne was banned for 18 months (reduced to 10 on appeal).
The other side of this is how scandals are swept under the carpet. I know of two stories (nothing to do with the horses, I should point out) which, were they to be made public, would be national sensations. Pretty much everyone in racing knows about them, I’m sure. But the racing media is largely supine and won’t bite the hand that feeds it, whilst the racing world closes ranks and protects its own. As it is now doing with Oisin Murphy.
