Stewards not paid to be nannies, nor taught to be softies

STEWARDS are good at some things, like sticking to rules and protocols, and clumsy at others.

Nikita McLean

STEWARDS are good at some things, like sticking to rules and protocols, and clumsy at others.

Stewards might argue they are not paid to be nannies, not taught to be softies.

But a softer touch would have prevented them from copping a bake from Judge Russell Lewis at yesterday's Nikita McLean appeal.

A few kind measured words, delivered with a soft hand on the shoulder, may even have prevented McLean from belting her sister, Jackie Beriman.

The stewards who ran the now infamous Hamilton race meeting earlier this month were robotic in their handling of a delicate situation.

McLean was upset and an upset jockey in the volatile environment of a racetrack -- where racing is dangerous and jockeys' rooms claustrophobic -- can be a powder keg.

McLean had stormed out of the stewards' room during an inquiry, upset that her sister had (according to McLean) made up a story that McLean had kicked her.

McLean was upset about that and upset that her estranged husband, Brad, who resides in her house and pays no rent, had tapped her on the bum with his whip.

So when a steward ordered her back to the stewards' room just before she was about to mount up for race six, McLean was never going to respond with a smile.

She told them to eff off.

It was her sister and her husband who put McLean in tears that day but the stewards, by not sensing the mood properly and dealing with it accordingly, contributed to her volatility.

A few months back, another stewards' panel booted injured apprentice Katelyn Mallyon out of the female jockeys' room.

They pointed to the rule book, utterly ignoring the bigger picture of a kid who needed the reassurance of her peers and her workplace as she embarked on her recovery.

Mallyon was devastated.

The stewards didn't just handle the race meeting badly regarding McLean.

They had the option of merely charging McLean -- for whacking her sister and ignoring a directive; their specialty -- and handballing her to the appeals board for penalty.

Instead, they used robot logic and gave her five months and winced as the judge halved it.