Racing: Norton banned for four months after failing cocaine test

A four-month ban from riding was imposed yesterday on Francis Norton, one of Flat racing's top lightweight jockeys. Norton, 33, had given a positive sample for benzoylecgonine, a metabolite of cocaine.

The sample was given on 26 September last year when a team from UK Sport visited Norton at his home in Newmarket. Months of legal wrangling followed between the Jockey Club and Norton's legal team, and the disciplinary hearing had been repeatedly deferred until yesterday. The hearing in London lasted more than four hours. Norton and the Jockey Club used independent medical experts as witnesses.

Norton's defence revolved around two possible suggestions as to the source of the substance. Firstly, that an exotic herbal tea could have been responsible for the positive sample. Second, that it could have arisen from contamination by handling bank notes, used by others for snorting cocaine before coming into his possession.

Norton told the panel he could unknowingly have been given the drink containing the sample by a friend. But the committee found that the "account about how the illegal substance was in his friend's possession, and how it may have been ingested by Norton, and his friend's inability to explain satisfactorily how it was that he alighted on this substance as a possible source, left the panel not satisfied with the explanation".

They found that the possibility of contamination through bank notes was "overwhelmingly unlikely".

However, in an unusual twist, the Jockey Club's case that the source arose from a "misuse of Class A drugs" was also rejected, leaving the disciplinary panel to draw the conclusion that "there could be another cause for which no explanation follows".

Norton is the third jockey to have failed a test for elements of cocaine since testing was introduced in 1994. The previous two were Dean Gallagher, who was banned for 18 months, having already served a punishment for the same offence in France, and apprentice Philip Shea, who was given six months in July 2000.

As he left, Norton declined to comment, but his solicitor, Christopher Stewart-Moore, said: "The sentence reflects the third of the Jockey Club's findings - which will appear in the Racing Calendar - to the effect that there was no proof of deliberate ingestion of cocaine, given the extremely low reading of the urine test, as agreed by the experts giving evidence at the hearing."

Norton's worldwide ban starts on 19 December. He is due to resume riding from 19 April, four weeks into the next turf Flat season. Norton has been particularly successful in valuable handicaps. His victories included York's Ebor Handicap, as well as the Britannia Handicap at Royal Ascot.

* Flat jockeys Keith Dalgleish and Joe Fanning, both of whom failed a random breath test for alcohol, could face inquiries "early in the new year", the Jockey Club said last night. The "B" tests on subsequent urine samples taken have been confirmed as positive.