There were angry scenes in the weighing room at Kenilworth on Saturday when several senior jockeys refused to ride – and accusations of intimidation when junior riders, booked to take their place, reneged on their commitments.

Rain started to come down about an hour before racing and continued, almost unabated, for the rest of the afternoon. After half the ten races had been run a delegation of jockeys went to the stipes and said the course was unsafe.

“The riders protested in the presence of trainers but an initial decision was made to continue the meeting,” said Nick Shearer, acting senior stipe and himself a former jockey. “We did our best to keep it going but the vast majority of jockeys were of the opinion that the track was unsafe and so the rest of the meeting was then abandoned.”

Those attempting to keep the show on the road included fellow stipe Cecil van As and apprentice riding master Terrance Welch who booked less established riders to replace the big names – no easy task when trainers had also to be consulted. But their efforts were thwarted when a number of those accepting rides announced that they had changed their minds after returning from the jockeys’ inner sanctum – and a presumably hostile reception.

A few of the trainers promptly gave vent to their annoyance, and it is easy to understand why. Getting a horse ready for a race takes weeks, if not months, of hard work and to have it thwarted by the last man in the chain must be infuriating. They were faced with replanning everything and explaining to the owners footing the bill that it could be many weeks before there is another suitable race.

Jockeys refusing to ride when conditions underfoot turn nasty is nothing new in Cape Town even though, curiously, it is much rarer in the wetter parts of Europe where they frequently ride on atrocious ground.

That said, it is the jockeys whose necks are on the line and who are in the best position to judge whether the weather and the ground are making their job even more dangerous than usual. Riding a highly strung thoroughbred at speeds of up to 60 kilometres an hour calls for guts of a special kind and, if jockeys believe that conditions are increasing their chances of being pitched into a deadly sea of flailing metal-tipped hooves, their views have to take priority over all else. If any of them were killed or paralysed, after being put under pressure to ride, South African racing would never be allowed to forget it.

Aldo Domeyer won three of the five races run, and has now scored on half his last 22 Kenilworth rides, but it was Piet Botha who stole his thunder.  The 40-year-old, medically boarded with supposedly-permanent nerve damage, rode his first winner for seven years when springing a 50-1 shock on Jay Rock and two races later he did it again on the appropriately named Dreaming Big who started at 66-1. He must have thought he was dreaming – certainly the bookmakers did.

Both winners were for Glen Puller who has had a tough season and who has done so much to help the rider with his return to the fray. “I didn’t think I could come back and it was my 12-year-old son Adrian who pushed me into it,” Botha related. “I have really been wanting my first winner and now I have got two. My days are really busy. I spend the mornings on the racing work and the rest of the day on my coffee machine business. I have invested a lot of money in that so I want to keep it going.”

By Michael Clower