Racing is always unpredictable. Racing is sometimes tough to watch for horse lovers, and it’s sometimes tragic. Last Saturday’s Sydney Cup was one of those tragic times.

Almoonqith quite clearly suffered a major injury on the turn out of the straight on the first round and literally collapsed to his near side, dropping James Doyle, and cannoning into Who Shot The Barman, dislodging Blake Shinn. The incident was not pretty to see and certainly disrupted the field behind the fall. Who Shot The Barman galloped on, but Almoonqith stayed down. The stewards had to make a quick call and declared a No Race when it was obvious that Almoonqith could not move out of the path of the remaining runners.

Was it the right call?

Not according to Corey Brown and Damian Oliver, who were unaware that the No Race had been declared and, understandably, expressed their disappointment. No win, no prizemoney, no glory.

There are several ways to look at the situation.

Firstly, the safety of the horses and riders has to be the major consideration – always. The fact that Almoonqith wasn’t moving doesn’t detract from the fact that the stewards could not know how severe the horse’s injury was, and had to consider the possibility that the horse was stunned, may have recovered and could quite conceivably have galloped back into the path of the oncoming field. The reality is that James Doyle wasn’t quick to his feet and could not have been reasonably expected to keep an injured – and possibly panicked – horse under control.

The opposing view was that falls happen in racing, Who Shot The Barman wasn’t a problem, and the race should have continued. The fact that many of the runners lost all chance due to the fall is simply part of racing. The incident occurred after the winning post, and at a point on the track where the riders would have been pulling their mounts up after the race, not riding them out to the line. Conceivably, the riders would have been able to avoid the stricken horse. There was certainly time to get people out to warn the riders there was a problem. Similar situations are not unusual in jumps racing, and they can be managed.

But is that view reasonable?

It’s pretty obvious that the stewards were on a hiding to nothing here. Let the race go on and run the risk of a major incident is an untenable choice in our increasingly litigious and safety conscious society. Call it off, and there will be criticism that the decision was too hasty. So, as with most things in racing, there can be arguments made for both options, and there will be pub talk about the rights or wrongs until the whole thing fades away.

All of that, though, just doesn’t get to the crux of the issue.

What the problem really amounted to is that many of the riders just didn’t hear the warning siren that was sounded to indicate the No Race, and so they kept racing. They couldn’t look behind them to see other riders pulling their mounts up, they had more pressing matters to attend to and were most likely completely oblivious to the fact that there had been a fall behind them. Last time I looked, horses didn’t carry rearview mirrors! And that is the real issue. In situations like this, there must be a foolproof method of signaling a No Race. A siren system that can’t be heard isn’t a siren system that is satisfactory. That’s what needs to be fixed, and it surely can’t be an impossible or excessively expensive ask. For all practical purposes, siren points at 400 metre intervals around the track would have to solve the problem.

So, were the stewards right or wrong? On balance, they were right, but the archaic siren system at Randwick has to be fixed!