Stable girl kicked in head claims £200,000

A STABLE girl is suing a top trainer for more than £200,000 after being kicked in the head by a racehorse and left with brain damage.

Maisie Beth Wood, 25, fractured her skull and now has to use a walking frame following the accident in 2018 while working for William Muir.

She claimed the ‘highly strung’ and ‘difficult to handle’ horse called Malaguena had always been sedated when taken out, but was not on the day it injured her by bolting when it was ‘spooked’.

Miss Wood is now suing Mr Muir for more than £200,000 at the High Court over the horse not being drugged before she rode it at the trainer’s Linkslade stables near Lambourn, Berkshire.

But lawyers for Mr Muir, whose stable star won the Group 1 Coronation Cup at Epsom last year, deny liability, claiming that Miss Wood, pictured with Malaguena, was doing her job and was injured through no fault of theirs.

According to court documents, Miss Wood had taken the horse on a warm-up canter. The filly moved ‘violently’, causing Miss Wood to fall off and land on her head.

After Malaguena was caught, a more senior member of staff offered to ‘leg’ her back into the saddle. But while Miss Wood was trying to remount, the horse was ‘very worked up’, says her solicitor Richard Brooks.

It bolted as Miss Wood got on, spilling her to the ground again, where she was struck in the head by the filly’s rear foot as she fell. Her lawyer says she had ‘no chance’ of controlling the horse.

Miss Wood suffered a fractured mandible, the largest bone in the skull, and ‘mild traumatic brain injury’, leading to her suffering repeated seizures.

Denying any negligence, Mr Muir’s barrister Roger Harris said: ‘There was no requirement on the part of the defendant to sedate the horse.’

A full trial will be held at a later date.