by Dick Francis
However, it might be as well to get the whole business of injuries into some sort of perspective, as it is his body’s growing loss of resilience which forces every steeplechase jockey, near his fortieth birthday, into a retirement for which his heart and mind may be unready.
I suppose that on an average during a whole season one may expect to fall about once in fifteen races, though the proportion may be a good deal lower than that for a jockey who only rides in hurdle races.
The usual course of events, when one has ruefully picked oneself up and inspected for indecency the torn breeches which are going to cost more to replace than the fee one was paid for wearing them, is to totter off on the long tramp back to the weighing-room. All jockeys complain that their mounts unerringly part company with them, as if by instinct, at the furthest point from home, and although it is of course possible to lie still and feign rigor mortis until the ambulance comes dashing up to collect the corpse, this sensible way of securing a lift back is apt to be unpopular with one’s beloved on the stands.
One extremely wet day at Southwell, however, I warned Mary that if I should fall at the far end of the course, she could be almost sure that any white flag-waving would only be the result of some realistic playacting on my part, as I had no intention of walking half a mile in the mud in my thin racing boots, if it could be avoided. To my disgust, the horse I was riding slid ten yards on his haunches as he landed over the furthest hurdle, and threw me off on to the squelching turf.
All according to plan I rubbed at an uninjured ankle until the nearest First-Aid man held up his sodden white flag, and waved it about in the rain. The ambulance trundled slowly up the field towards me, and stopped about a hundred yards away. My First-Aider walked off to find out why he had not come any nearer, and came back to tell me that the driver said the ground was too wet, and the ambulance would be driving into a bog, if he came any further. Would I, he asked, try to get to the ambulance with his help, in spite of my no doubt grave injuries. I rose at once, and we walked towards the waiting van, but most unfortunately I forgot to limp, and before we reached it the ambulance suddenly backed away, turned round, and drove implacably off back to the stands without me. As I slithered and slid my cold way down the course, soaked to the skin and with every prospect of being late for my next race, I cursed the black heart of that unfriendly ambulance driver with every unprintable oath I could think of.
The standard of efficiency, good-humour and common sense among First-Aid men at race meetings varies wildly from the unsurpassably good to the frankly terrifying. To those of them who know their job one cannot be too grateful, for they stand for hours in the wind and rain, in lonely places beside the scattered fences, on the chance that someone will fall there and need their help. But the bad ones are a menace to life and especially limb. I did not believe it when I was told that one First-Aider had picked up my wrists, and another my ankles, and between them had lifted and swung my unconscious body off the course in this fashion, until a few weeks later, when I saw the same thing happen to Fred Winter at the same fence. If either of us had had a broken or dislocated arm or leg or spine, we would have suffered far more damage from the ‘first-aid’ than from the fall itself. A broken bone could have ripped its way through muscle and skin, nerves, ligaments or spinal cord could have been irreparably torn, and we in our helpless unconsciousness could not have felt the pain that would have forced our rescuers to be careful if we had been awake.
After a fall, whether he has returned on his horse, on foot, or in the ‘blood wagon’, every jockey must be passed fit by a doctor before he may ride again, so a detour to the first-aid room is routine.
One goes in, says to the doctor, ‘I had a fall, but there’s no damage,’ and if one is obviously in a healthy state he nods his agreement and one is free to go off and repeat the whole dreary business. One afternoon I fell three times without harm, and the third time I appeared the doctor laughed at me, and said, ‘Why don’t you just wait here until after the next race? It will be so much less trouble for you than bothering to start off on a horse and walking back.’
The morning after a fall one may wake up stiff, and during the day discover that sundry small areas of skin are missing, or notice a large bruise on some part that one cannot even remember bumping, but that is all the trouble one should expect from the majority of falls.
Really bad falls are mercifully rare, and some of the most appalling-looking crashes leave both jockey and horse unhurt. One day at Sandown Park, Fighting Line fell with me and rolled right over me, but incredible as it may seem from the series of photographs which was taken of this catastrophe, I was hardly even bruised. At Towcester I fell on my head over the last fence and was knocked out, and I was told that the horse I was riding lay winded on top of my head and shoulders, so that for some minutes all that could be seen of me was an inert pair of legs. The horse rocked backwards and forwards on me as he struggled to his feet, but an hour later I was driving home, without so much as a headache.
There is about one chance in five hundred of being killed: that is to say, of roughly five hundred jockeys riding, an average of one is killed every year. The chances of being badly hurt for a long time, or for life, are only slightly higher. Fred Winter broke his back one year, and his leg another, and missed a whole season each time. George Slack broke his shoulder when schooling one morning in January 1956, and he lost nearly two years. Lionel Vick severed his spinal cord high up in his back, and became an Incorporated Accountant in his wheel chair. A fractured skull ended the riding careers of George Owen, Martin Molony and Fred Thackeray. Fred Rimell rode in a race for the last time on the day he should have been the guest of honour at the dinner given to celebrate his being Champion Jockey. He spent the evening in Cheltenham Hospital instead, with a broken neck.
The tale of woe goes back to the beginning of steeplechasing.
The number of bones each jockey may expect to break varies a great deal, because some men have strong bones, and others brittle. Jack Dowdeswell’s collar-bones broke so often and so easily, that in the end he had them taken out. On the other hand, Tim Molony was made of india-rubber. He had his share of falls, but the only big bone I recall him breaking was his leg, which finished his career in 1958. One or two of mine cracked every season. My nose and ribs are no longer in mint condition, and my collar-bone score to date is twelve.
Most injuries are to shoulders, because that is usually the part which meets the ground first. The best way to fall is to roll as soon as the shoulder touches the ground, tuck in the head, draw the knees up, and stay still, for it is much easier for a horse galloping over a man to avoid kicking him if he is not moving. Some of the very worst injuries are due to being kicked when one is still rolling from a fall, but horses will avoid fallen riders if they possibly can. It is extremely stupid and very dangerous to try to get up before all the horses have gone safely past.
If you fall on your head you are not likely to know about it for some time. The thin cotton and shellac wall of a crash helmet saves your life, but probably ruins itself doing so, and a trek to London for a new one becomes an urgent errand. Races are run at an average speed of thirty miles an hour, and falling on the unprotected head at that pace may well be final. It is interesting that since September, 1956, all flat race jockeys also are compelled by regulations to wear crash helmets, because although they are not often pitched off on to their heads, there have been times for them too when a helmet could have diminished bad concussion to a bump.
Although it may seem that steeplechase jockeys are recklessly risking their lives in a dangerous sport, it is a matter of record that the death rate of window cleaners is very much higher. If any window cleaners’ wives are reading this, I sincerely apologise for passing on this most unwelcome piece of news.
I would be interested to know whether insurance companies accept the custom of window cleaners, for very few of them will take on a National Hunt jockey except at a premium so large that he would have to be hu
rt for two months before the company had even paid back to him his own money. When I was an amateur I tried several insurance companies, and was finally allowed to pay one of the biggest of them a large sum of money each year, which was to be returned to me in small instalments if I should be injured; and to my amusement and mystification, the policy said I was to be paid double in the melancholy event of my losing an arm or leg on the railway.
After three years the company would not renew their agreement with me, in spite of having made a good. profit from my excellent health. I am very grateful to them, for if I had gone on paying the premium, their profit by now would be so enormous that I would have to lie in front of a train if they were to lose money on the deal.
Luckily, however, there is a comforting institution called the Levy Board Accident Scheme, which pays a weekly sum to any jockey who is unable to ride because he has been injured. Into this fund every jockey pays a small proportion from every riding fee he receives.
It is an ironic fact that when I rode in enough races I usually paid to the injury fund more than I did to the insurance company; but at least I had the pleasure of knowing I was helping my investments to get back into the saddle as quickly as possible.
The enemy which puts more jockeys out of work than any injury is the weather: and if anyone should think that their anxiety to switch on any nearby wireless when the warnings of the meteorological office are due on the air is in any way obsessive, he probably does not know that bad weather not only often keeps them grounded, but also upsets the form of the horses they ride, so that they find perhaps that a horse they were looking forward to winning on when the ground was hard, is skidding and hopeless after rain has made the surface slippery.
The steeplechasing season begins on the first of August and ends on the following Whit Monday, but is at its height only from October until the Grand National at the end of March, and most winters we waste days and weeks of this precious six months staring out of the window at the frozen ground and wishing we could shift the British Isles ten degrees south.
In the year 1955 racing was abandoned for the following reasons: snow, frost, fog, waterlogged ground, and large cracks due to drought. Worcester racecourse was flooded to a depth of five feet by the overflowing Severn, and Newton Abbot was ruined for a year by sea water from a breached canal.
Fog is the most annoying thing of all. Frost and floods are at least definite, and the impersonal voice of the 9 a.m. newsreader saves many a useless journey, but fog is so mobile and so local, that racing is not usually abandoned because of it until the scheduled time for the first race is drawing near. So off one goes in the mist, starting an hour earlier than usual, and drives perhaps a hundred miles to discover whether one can see the last hurdle and the last fence from the stands. If these obstacles remain infuriatingly out of sight, back one creeps in the murk and the gloom, and arrive home very tired, with fog-strained eyes, lungs, and temper.
One can never be sure that at the last moment racing will be possible after all, for fog is freakish stuff. One November day, when fog had been accurately forecast to smother the Midlands, we slowly drove into Wolverhampton, where at noon the streets were indistinct in a yellowish black oily cloud, to the racecourse beside the railway lines two or three hundred yards further on. To our utter astonishment and delight, the mist there was thin and white, and all the races were held without question and at the right times. At the end of the afternoon we drove out of the car park straight back into the night that had lasted all day in Wolverhampton.
When I arrived one morning at Sandown Park and walked up to the weighing-room in the bright April sunshine, I was surprised by the lack of the usual bustle there.
‘It’s the fog,’ said the valets.
‘Fog?’ I looked rather wildly out of the window at the blue sky.
‘Go and look at the course,’ they said.
So I walked down the slope from the weighing-room with the sun warm on my back, and through the archway under the stands to the course. I could see nothing, and it was cold. The swirling mist had collected on the lower ground and had banked up against the long line of massive stands, and although it looked so light and fluffy, there it stayed while we cursed it in the sunshine ten yards away, and there we left it an hour later when we all went home.
Hailstorms, bitter winds, and fog with about two hundred yards visibility do not interfere with the racing programme itself, although a jockey may find it somewhat difficult to ride a clever and well-judged race if he can hardly see where he is going; and the crowds are mostly concerned with avoiding frostbite between races in the bars. However, not even the rigours of our officially temperate climate can cool the true devotee’s enthusiasm for the sport to the point of keeping him at home, so that even in the worst of raceable weather there are still to be seen the mournfully dripping groups of punters under the bookmakers’ umbrellas, the stable lads, blue-nosed and red-fingered in the cold, stolidly trudging round and round the parade ring with their horses, and the shapeless mackintoshed bundles in sheepskin boots and headscarves, hurrying to put fifty pence each way from the housekeeping money on the Tote.
Only once was I actually overtaken by a blizzard. I had been engaged to ride Gallery in the National Trial Steeplechase at Wetherby, and Mary and I set off to go there across country by train, as the car was having its appendix out, or some such operation on its broken-down interior.
Everything that the railways could do had been done to make that journey the most spectacularly uncomfortable one we had ever undergone, not excluding the day we crossed the bleak black-rock Pennines in a freezing wind in a borrowed open two-seater M.G., and had a puncture in the snow at the top.
As I went out on Gallery for the fourth race a few snowflakes were beginning to fall, and as we circled round at the starting gate they swirled about us thicker and thicker, until they enclosed us completely and we could no longer see the stands or the fences. For a quarter of an hour we walked round in a circle, while the snow fell steadily into our eyes and down our necks, and settled quickly on the ground.
When it became so deep that even if it stopped at once there was more than enough to ball up in the horses’ feet and prevent them galloping properly, the race was abandoned, and we rode disconsolately back to the paddock looking like a row of mounted snowmen.
Back to Cheshire went Mary and I on the long succession of chilly buses and trains, noticing that the coal fires in the waiting-rooms of both the Manchester stations seemed to consist of the identical black and faintly smoking lumps we had huddled over in the morning.
There was only one consolation for our pointless journey, and that was that in spite of the fact of their not having started the race, all the jockeys were to be paid their fees as if they had. Not long before this a fee was only paid if the horse and its rider actually came under starter’s orders, but after one or two incidents when jockeys had been thrown and hurt in the paddock or on their way to the start, or their mounts had injured themselves and had been withdrawn at the post, it was decided that a fee was owing to a jockey as soon as he had passed the scales.
The new ruling could not have found a better justification than the blizzard race at Wetherby, but as the full beauty of it slowly dawned upon the ranks of jockeys, some curious things happened. Several Clerks of the Scales, for instance, could not account for the eagerness of a queue of grinning jockeys who had changed into racing colours much earlier than usual to pass out for the first race on foggy days, when it was probable that they would immediately have to get dressed again and go home. One or two enterprising young criminals worked out a scheme for passing the scales (and so being paid a fee) for riding a horse which had not even been declared a runner for the race; but their ingenious plotting was never put to the test. The Clerks of the Scales were all at once deeply suspicious of every jockey weighing out a minute before it was necessary, and on misty days horses, trainers and owners had almost to be waiting in the paddock before their jockeys were allowed to
pass the money barrier of the weighing machine. Alas, the fun went out of the game, but the rule itself has proved its value, and is now taken for granted.
The discomfort one brings upon oneself from injury and bitter weather is often enough to make one wonder aloud, ‘Why on earth be a jockey?’ but before I can try to answer that question there is another disadvantage to be considered, a disadvantage less physical and less definite than the other two, but perhaps more painful all the same. This, simply, is disappointment.
There is first the direct disappointment of missing races through injury or frost, and this is an uncomplicated emotion, because one knows one cannot alter the weather, or ride if one is unfit. The bones will mend, the thaw will come, and all will be well again.
Secondly, there is the disappointment of losing a race one had reasonably hoped to win, and the heavy feeling of knowing that all the trainer’s hard work has been wasted, and the owner’s hopes been extinguished. The most usual cause of this common frustration is that another horse has proved better on the day, for however eager or skilful the jockey may be, and however great his will to win, he cannot succeed if his mount is not good enough.
So many things can go wrong which no jockey can foresee or avoid, and three seconds delay, for any reason, is enough to lose most races. One’s horse may not be feeling on top of the world at the right moment, he may not like the hardness, softness or slipperiness of the ground, he may hit a fence a bit hard and jump too cautiously from then on, he may be baulked or knocked over by other horses who are themselves unbalanced or falling, or he may tangle his legs up and fall himself, in spite of all his jockey’s efforts to get him to meet a fence well. The horse may injure himself by pulling a tendon, or by striking into his forelegs with his hind feet, or by staking himself in a losing argument with a hurdle, and have to drop out of the race.