Racing is safer than ever, but falling is still an art
Richard Johnson’s stroke of bad luck highlights a key lesson for every jockey, writes Marcus Armytage
We have been denied a ding-dong battle for the champion jockey’s title
The injury which will sideline champion jump jockey Richard Johnson until the Cheltenham Festival will not only severely compromise his chances of a fifth title but denies racing what looked like a ding-dong battle between him and the North-based Brian Hughes.
Ironically, given the inherent risks 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!”
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, Johnson’s career had got as far as him being led round his father’s farm on a pony, and much has changed since.
Back then, they used to say a jockey would generally hit the deck in 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 one fall per 14 rides.
In 2001, the faller/ unseated rate had fallen to 5.6 per cent (roughly one fall for every 18 rides) and in 2019 it was down to 3.7 (one in 27 rides).
There are a number of factors behind this, one being changes brought in under the headline of the welfare and safety of the horse, such as removing or re-siting tricky fences, changing obstacle design, improving the ground and pulling unsound horses out before a race. Also, horses are generally 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, while the Injured Jockeys Fund’s three rehabilitation centres around the country are pretty much halving recovery times for broken bones.
The older generation have learned how to fall through experience, so that rolling up in a ball becomes instinctive, but a key part of a young jockey’s coaching now is in how to fall.
The British Racing School uses 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 Lindsay Nylund, looks set to be rolled out.
Nylund starts lectures by citing an old Mexican proverb: “It is not enough to ride, you must know how to fall.” Of course, you can adhere to that, as Richard Johnson has for years, but then sometimes there is no accounting for bad luck.