After Arc triumph, Fallon in court over race-fixing

Irish jockey Kieren Fallon won one of the world's top horse races to tumultuous acclaim in Paris yesterday (NZ time). Today he was in London's historic Old Bailey court accused of race-fixing.

In a case that reads like the plot of a Dick Francis racing thriller, Fallon sat impassively in the dock listening to the prosecution open its case against him, two other jockeys and three other men.

They are accused of conspiracy to defraud customers of the betting exchange Betfair.

For Fallon, the contrast could not have been more stark.

At the weekend, he rode Dylan Thomas to a thrilling victory in the Prix de L'Arc de Triomphe but then had to wait an agonising 30 minutes before surviving a stewards' inquiry that could have cost him the race.

Prosecutor Jonathan Caplan alleged that Fallon, six-times champion jockey in Britain and three-times winner of the Epsom Derby, was involved with two other jockeys in agreeing to cheat in 27 races and make their mounts lose.

The jury was told that the horses did not always lose but when the jockeys allegedly obliged, then a syndicate run by businessman Miles Rodgers was able to make hefty profits.

The six defendants, including Fallon's fellow jockeys Darren Williams and Fergal Lynch, all deny the charges in the trial that could last up to four months.

The prosecutor said of Fallon: "There can be no question that he is regarded as being one of the leading jockeys in the world."

Caplan told the the jurors the case was important because it is "concerned with sport and any allegation of fraud in that context obviously undermines the integrity of the sport in question".

Highlighting how complex the case is for a layman to grasp, he said: "The defendants in this case did not fix races to ensure a particular horse won. On the contrary, they fixed the races to ensure that the horses in question lost."

Rodgers, the prosecutor alleged, had to lay huge sums of money to win relatively small amounts – but he could do so safe in the knowledge that the horse would lose. Police bugged his car to record calls he made.

The jury, presented with bundles of evidence, had to grapple with a complex web of mobile phone and text messages, check their timing and see when Rodgers gambled with BetFair.

Th jurors, who will be asked to watch the races and view surveillance film, were told not to worry if they knew nothing about racing and just confined themselves to an annual bet on the Derby and the Grand National.

- Reuters