THE SUNSHINE COAST NEWSPAPER COLUMN - NO PLACE FOR FEAR IN THIS PROFESSION

By Graham Potter | Sunday, September 16, 2012

It has long been said that a jockey has one of the most dangerous professions in the world. Those who push that view underline it by asking, where else does an ambulance follow you around when you are at work?

The average horse weighs 1000 pounds. The average horse can run 35 miles an hour (ok I know your slow one doesn’t). Put a dozen or so of them together of various temperaments and capabilities and ask them to race at close quarters under the guidance of riders with different degrees of expertise and, yes … whether you agree with that original assessment or not, the fact is that the risk riders face in terms of physical danger in every race is huge.

In such a profession there can be no place for any fear of danger. Respect for danger … absolutely … but there can be no fear. When a jockey loses his nerve he has nothing to offer other than having the dubious attribute of being a liability to his colleagues.

In an earlier column I discussed the extraordinary physical and mental demands that many jockeys go through in terms of dealing with their respective weight issues in order to take a ride in the first place.

Well, the danger factor mentioned above is what they encounter after they successfully work through their weight issues. Some reward!

While the results of physical demands made on the body and its associated mental anguish can be monitored and managed, the danger element is a random factor from which no rider is immune.

In this respect riders are vulnerable not only in a race, but also whenever they are on a horse such as at track-work, in the race preliminaries or the return to scale.

Sometimes the horse doesn't even have to be on the move. At Ipswich on Friday and unraced four-year-old Parisian Pearl planted its feet and refused to go out onto the track and her mood got more and more unpleasant the longer they tried to coax her against her will.

When she made her final statement by rearing up and then hurling herself over sideways onto the ground jockey Skye Bogenhuber was momentarily in dire straits. The crash to the ground was forceful. The impact severe.

It looked for a moment from the angle of the fall that Bogenhuber might disappear under the horse with obvious, possible disastrous consequences but, thankfully, that did not occur as the horse fell alongside her.

Bogenhuber took a moment to gather herself, dust herself off and then she walked away, reportedly with only a damaged shoulder. The horse was fine so that was a relatively happy ending to a scary moment … but it was a sober reminder to all of us who watch from the safety of the grandstand that the racing is a hard task-master and, whatever else we may say about them, most jockeys are a tough as they come.

The Skye Bogenhuber / Parisian Pearl incident at Ipswich.

It was sober reminder to all of us who watch from the safety of the grandstand that the racing is a hard task-master and, whatever else we may say about them, most jockeys are a tough as they come.