Yeung's departure highlights need for a rethink on honest mistakes

We hope the stipes were reading between the lines on Sunday when promising jockey Thomas Yeung Kai-tong threw a bright and potentially lucrative career on the scrapheap and declared his intention to get a business-management degree instead.

Yeung said he had been considering this 'for the past four months or so' and after taking into account the counsel of family members he had decided on the further-education option.

This column suggests it's no small coincidence that four months ago Yeung was suspended for nine meetings for failing to give Packing Winner every possible chance of winning or obtaining the best-possible placing at Sha Tin on February 8.

We spoke out strongly about what was an unfair, inappropriate decision.

Yeung's guilty plea and failure to appeal merely reflected his intrinsically shy personality and the fact the imagined pain of the appeal process seemed as awful to him as the unjust medicine he had already been made to swallow.

In 2006, this column also disagreed with the stewards over their decision to ban Robbie Fradd on an identical charge for an honest mistake on Healthy Fruits.