My full speed is child’s play compared to what jockeys face

Last Saturday I was one of the 29,042 punters gathered at Punchestown racecourse to watch the final day’s action of the National Hunt season. This was a record attendance at the Kildare track. Horse racing is a sport we do incredibly well in Ireland with estimates that it is worth in the region of over €1bn annually. The competitor in me loves watching horse racing, there are so many elements that make it enthralling.

A few weeks ago, I bumped into Ruby Walsh. It was after his fall in Cheltenham, he had dislocated a shoulder and fractured the top of his humerus. I enquired how he was recovering, he was very quick to point out that he could almost straighten his arm and wanted to ride in Punchestown. I thought he was nuts!

The next time I saw Ruby Walsh was on Saturday in Punchestown. He was getting up on Abbyssial, the horse he fell from at Cheltenham. He went on to win in emphatic style and later that day was awarded with his ninth jockey’s title. No sign of the injury.

That’s the thing about jockeys, they’re wired differently from the rest of us. I get injured all the time. I’ve many war wounds from the years as a professional athlete, but I’m not fearless. I have an internal voice of protection and I think about the consequences. I’ve had one really bad fall in a race where I ended up in an ambulance afterwards. It definitely left its scars and even now I can remember the feeling of crashing out over the 10th hurdle at full speed but my full speed at a hurdle is child’s play compared to what a jockey faces, day in and day out.

Different sports carry different levels of risk in terms of injury. Within athletics, my event, the hurdles, there is a risk of falling. I have seen some bad falls down through the years. The pole vault carries an even higher level of risk, I think it’s the most dangerous track and field discipline. Pole-vault competitors participate in the knowledge that some of their predecessors have experienced horrific injuries. Saying all that, the risk of injury faced by athletes pales into insignificance when compared to that of jump jockeys.

The fear of falling and hurting themselves doesn’t seem to exist for jockeys. Rather than think about the consequences of what might happen if a race goes wrong, they focus on the wins and the good horses they will get to ride in the future. There is always another race to win. After Ruby fell at Cheltenham, the focus was on finding a way back for the Punchestown Festival. There doesn’t seem to be time spent pondering the pain of the fall.

I’ve watched AP McCoy in many races and last year I admired his unbelievable achievement of having ridden 4,000 winners. He’s a jockey who has had a huge amount of falls but they don’t seem to matter. I often hear him point out in interviews that horse racing is the only sport in the world that two ambulances follow the competitors around and it’s something worth thinking about. I can’t imagine lining up and knowing the probability of a fall was that high. Yet he seems to be able to turn that knowledge off.

The jockeys can acknowledge the dangers while not thinking about it. They seem to live by the idea that the worst will never happen to them and being grateful that their falls are not worse. A shoulder is not a head or a neck after all. While everyone in the weighing room is a competitor, they are also colleagues and friends, the bad days affect all of them. Most recently the serious injury suffered by JT McNamara at Cheltenham last year or the death of Kieran Kelly in 2003 as a result of a fall in Kilbeggan shocked the world of jockeys. They are incredibly grateful it’s not them and AP McCoy speaks of his feeling that he is somehow unbreakable. Perhaps that’s the only way someone can be a great jump jockey, to hang on to the notion they are indestructible.

It’s not only fearless jockeys that Ireland produces. Whether it’s trainers or horses, we produce top class results. Sometimes in Irish sport a foreign accent goes a long way. There can be a tendency to assume that a non-Irish option is of higher value. In horse racing, the tradition of producing results from home-grown talent is incredible.

The horse racing industry is a massive employer here with around 14,000 people working in it. Ireland is the biggest producer of thoroughbred foals in Europe and the fourth biggest in the world.

The National Hunt season is over for another year. It brought with it the ever-present, fearless resolve of the jockeys to produce result after result and the reassurance that the horse racing industry in Ireland is fighting fit.