It was done in the heat of the moment, but the objection Richard Hills lodged against the Champion Stakes victory of Twice Over came as no surprise at all.

Riding Mawatheek, Hills brought his horse with a determined challenge approaching the final furlong – only to find his progress interrupted by Tom Queally aboard the eventual winner.

In this instance it made no difference to the outcome, with Hills consigned to the runner-up berth on Mawatheek. But his objection highlighted the growing sense of frustration enveloping jockeys in our major races.

Hills knew full well that his objection would provoke a chorus denouncing his lack of sportsmanship. Yet his actions warrant consideration precisely because objections in championship races are so rare.

So why did he do it? The answer has become a running sore on the face of the sport. Jockeys riding in Britain have been allowed to propogate a win-at-all-costs attitude. Whatever they do, their sole consideration is to ride their mounts, however roughly, into the winner’s circle.

Any subsequent ban is accepted in the knowledge that their horse will keep the race – not to mention the jockey’s four-figure cut of a six-figure prize, and the endorsement of the winning owner and trainer into the bargain.

In other words, the sanction of a two-day riding ban is so lacking in deterrent that it is no deterrent whatsoever.

Instances of horses being hampered by a rival failing to run straight – and with its jockey failing to address the issue until he has compromised the chances of others - are now commonplace. And it’s leaving a particularly sour taste in punters’ mouths.

It’s a similar story with overuse of the whip in major races. So frequently does this happen that a ban-free close finish has become the norm.

Indeed, Ryan Moore got two days for using his whip excessively when winning the Dewhurst on Beethoven. But here’s the rub. If the runner-up, Xtension, had been hit more times than Moore hit Beethoven, he would probably have gained the photo-finish verdict, instead of losing it.

The policy of allowing horses to keep races when jockeys flout the rules is nonsense. A better way is the French way, where horse and jockey are demoted if they cause intererence to any horse whose finishing position is deemed to have been compromised.

This, too, has its flaws – witness the absurd demotion of Dar Re Mi from last month’s Prix Vermeille. Yet that was the consequence of human error by the stewards, rather than rules with no teeth.

In Britain, too, stewards are capable of some spectacularly bad calls. The fact that many rode under rules as amateurs, when they liked to think they mixed it with hardened pros, is surely responsible for their cavaliar attitude.

For punters, however, it has gone beyond a joke. Time after time, the horses they back are run into, carved up, or beaten by one whose jockey has used the whip excessively to his advantage.

No set of regulations are perfect, but those in Britain have long been rendered meaningless. The time for their overhaul is overdue.