Christophe Lemaire's 1,000 Guineas victory on Natagora proved what many racing professionals seem to doubt: that a jockey can win even his horse's career-defining race without misusing the whip. Lemaire achieved this despite the fact his horse was under pressure to hold on to her lead for the entirety of the final two furlongs.

The whip has emerged in recent months as the sport's most contentious issue, setting the sport's authorities at loggerheads with many of its constituents. A flurry of extreme cases was succeeded by a rash of bans at the Cheltenham Festival. Since then, several leading jockeys and trainers have argued that the rules are overly stringent.

Lemaire's ride on Natagora makes a strong case against this view. Or perhaps Lemaire is simply more skilful? Perhaps he is just better at his job - that is, delivering the right result within the rules of his chosen profession.

This will particularly irritate, of course, because Lemaire is French and any fool knows that French jockeys are not allowed to be good. There is a law against it. But the case of Natagora last Sunday particularly resonates because of the sheer number of challengers she repelled over a protracted period of time and the ultimately narrow margin of victory.

It hardly takes a great leap to suggest that most jockeys - French, Irish, British, whatever - in those circumstances would have resorted to their whip more often and with greater force than did Lemaire, resulting in at least one infringement of the whip rules.

Obviously, each horse reacts differently to a rider's various methods of galvanisation. Some give of their all for squeeze from the legs and a mind-focusing shake of the reins. Some engage the brakes if they feel the whip. Others yield their hidden reserves for it.

I am not among those who would like to see the whip banned. When used judiciously, it is a legitimate aid to getting a horse to give of its maximum athletic ability. That is not even to mention its utter necessity for steering, safety and correction.

However, it would help racing's cause enormously if it refrained from lumping together all usage of the whip as something worth defending. There is good usage and bad usage. Some jockeys are better than others, but that does not mean that even the best never once use their whip poorly.

Those who talk wildly about “not pandering to the antis” do their sport a huge disservice because they are displaying as little discrimination and understanding on the subject as those who blanket-attack the whip. Those who shrug off the importance of bans for serious whip offences are also letting us down.

It is all very well for responsible trainers to say that a jockey who abused a horse of theirs would not be re-employed, but plenty of their colleagues have and do. Even those who have made reasoned calls for greater restraint from the authorities must acknowledge that racing professionals must set themselves a higher standard of conduct than simply not abusing horses with the whip. Racing should be much, much better than that.

If we are sensibly to defend the whip, our case would be stronger if we criticised its ineffective use. I do not mean abuse here, I mean purely when, rather than encouraging a horse to give of its best - the premise - using the whip has the opposite or no effect.

Vast numbers of rides every day involve jockeys going for their whip too early, without first exhausting the range of communication skills with the horse. More often than races are definitively won by using the whip, races are lost because a horse hangs or edges away from it, conceding momentum or becoming unbalanced.

It is almost as if there is an obscure pride to wielding a whip when sometimes discretion achieves better results. It is time that more people admitted that, even to themselves.

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The 2,000 Guineas started six minutes after its advertised time, due mainly to the time it took for New Approach, the favourite, to be “ponied to post”. It is a calming method, rarely used in Britain or Ireland, whereby horse and jockey are led to the start by a mounted companion rather than making their way there independently.

However, on Saturday, this placed the other 14 horses at a disadvantage, creating an unwelcome and abnormal hiatus in their racing routine while they waited for New Approach to complete his customary practices.

No rules were broken, but at least one trainer was unhappy with the perceived impact on his horse. The chief steward on duty described the delay as “unsatisfactory”.

The problem may never arise again but, for equity's sake, perhaps the National Trainers' Federation, who devised the protocol on ponying, or the British Horseracing Authority may wish to alter it to ensure that, even when there is a pre-race parade, a horse ponied to post begins his journey early enough to prevent any inconvenience to his rivals.