Racing: Producer attacks Club fine

David Wintle, the Cheltenham trainer and televised racecourse brawler, was fined a total of £7,200 at the Jockey Club yesterday for bringing racing into disrepute. As he emerged from the disciplinary hearing at Portman Square Wintle said: "I have absolutely no comment to make."

The disciplinary panel viewed extracts from Kenyon Confronts as well as other video footage subsequently obtained from the BBC. Having considered the case, Wintle was found to be in breach of Rule 220(iii) in that he had indicated to the Kenyon Confronts team that he would be prepared not to run Seattle Alley on its merits to enable them to back the horse subsequently off a lower handicap mark.

For that, he was fined £4,500 but the trainer was also fined £2,200 for running Seattle Alley twice in such a way as to prevent the gelding from obtaining the best possible placing. And he was also fined £500 for acting in a violent manner towards Paul Kenyon at Stratford racecourse, an incident which was shown on the programme.

Wintle's punishment followed fines for fellow trainers Ferdy Murphy and Jamie Osborne, who both appeared in the same programme. "The Jockey Club, and the racing industry as a whole, traduced our journalism when we first revealed what was taking place under its nose and now these three cases have proven everything we said in the programme was totally accurate," Paul Woolwich, the executive producer of Kenyon Confronts, said yesterday.

"The Club had a golden opportunity to show the racing public that it was going to have no truck with this sort of cheating but, in reality, it has let all these trainers off with a rather pathetic slap on the wrist."