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The unseated rate for jockeys may have dropped but knowing how to fall off a horse is no trivial matter

Becoming unseated is a risk for any jockey but it is about minimising any injury - Getty Images Sport
Becoming unseated is a risk for any jockey but it is about minimising any injury - Getty Images Sport

The injury which will side-line champion jump jockey Richard Johnson until the Cheltenham Festival will not only severely compromise his chances of a fifth title but it has denied racing what looked like a ding-dong battle between him and the north-based Brian Hughes.

Ironically given the inherent risk of race riding, not since John Francome shared the title with Peter Scudamore in the 1981/82 season has the outcome of a championship been determined by an injury.

“I’d caught him up and passed him the season before when he’d broken his arm,” recalled Francome. “The following season he broke his leg when about a dozen winners clear of me. I thought ‘he’s a nice lad, he’s jinxed, he’ll never be champion jockey.’

“So I phoned his dad and said I’d ride until I caught up with him and then stop for the season. He was champion another seven times – that’s when I realised what a good judge I was!”

Richard Johnson broke his arm in a fall at Exeter this week - Credit: GETTY IMAGES
Richard Johnson broke his arm in a fall at Exeter this week Credit: GETTY IMAGES

In many ways Johnson was unlucky to break his right forearm at Exeter on Tuesday. He was unseated in a four horse race and rolled into the path of a horse behind. Nine times out of 10 a horse will avoid a jockey on the ground as I found out the first time I fell off – it was my first race over obstacles - mid-pack in a 23 runner hurdle race at Kempton.

The first thing that pleased me, indeed gave me confidence, was that instinctively I was already in a tight ball by the time I hit the ground.

I was aware of hooves all around me but not one brushed me and I do not think that was coincidence. Of course that was back in the early 1980s, Richard Johnson’s career had got as far as being led round his father’s farm on a leading rein pony and much has changed since.

Back then they used to say a jockey would generally hit the deck on one in 10 rides – I was doing my bit to lower it because I had a 100 per cent record of falling off after my first two rides – and one in 10 falls would result in an injury but that was probably something of a convenient statistic. Even back then it was probably more like 1 fall per 14 rides.

In 2001 the faller/unseated rate had fallen to 5.6 per cent (roughly 1 fall for every 18 rides) but in 2019 it was down to 3.7 (one in 27 rides).

With rugby coming up on its inside, racing might still be able to claim that being a jockey is the only profession where you are followed round in your work on a daily basis by an ambulance but that does not take into account the ambulances now parked beside the country’s rugby pitches on a Saturday afternoon.

Of course there are a number of factors for this and one of them is that everything done under the headline of the welfare and safety of the horse is also benefitting the safety of the jockey.

Removing or re-siting tricky fences, changing obstacle design, improving the ground and pulling unsound horses out before a race are all playing their part. Generally horses are also fitter and better schooled these days.

Jockeys are certainly fitter which means they get hurt less when they do fall, they have better equipment including state of the art helmets, and the Injured Jockeys Fund’s three rehabilitation centres around the country are pretty much halving recovery times for broken bones.

Though the older generation have learned to fall through experience so that rolling up in a ball becomes instinctive, a key part of a young jockey’s coaching now is in how to fall.

The British Racing School has an ‘equichute’ which runs along a rail before stopping abruptly and throwing a jockey off forwards. Tumbling on mats and rolling over a Swiss ball have been a staple and fall intervention training, the brainchild of Australian Commonwealth gymnast Lyndsay Nylund, looks set to be rolled out.

Nylund starts his lectures by citing an old Mexican proverb which goes; it’s not enough to ride, you must know how to fall. Of course you can adhere to that, as Johnson has for years, but then sometimes there is no accounting for bad luck.