Safety at the Grand National? Don’t be a nag

Will a woman win the world’s most famous horse race tomorrow? A dangerous – indeed, “extreme” – sport that inevitably risks the safety of rider and mount.

The two big themes of this year’s Grand National have coalesced – and reignited a perennial debate that appears to have no resolution.

Katie Walsh pulled up her ride Battlefront yesterday on the first competitive race around the new Grand National course – “new” because the fences have been redesigned to be softer and more forgiving.

Battlefront then died from a suspected heart attack, but it had – apparently – little if anything to with Aintree’s notoriously challenging jumps.

Shocking injury

I wrote recently about how safety has been the spectre that has stalked racing all year – since two horses died at the National last year, one last month at Cheltenham.  The debate manifested there as the risk to human, rather than equine life.

Jockey JT McNamara was paralysed after a fall and is currently in a special spinal rehab unit in Dubin. His life-limiting injury upset and shocked people far beyond the tight-knit world of jockeys, owners and trainers.

Now, this is not intended as a diatribe to ban or even denude racing of its inherent risks, but an effort to rehearse the arguments of the obvious and inescapable truth, to point out the unbridgeable gap between the public views of many in the racing industry and those in the animal rights camp who believe it to be inherently cruel. For there is also an inherent hypocrisy in this sport.

JT McNamara’s injuries are awful. But he is still alive. And, crucially, he chose to be a jockey – albeit an amateur – knowing full well the risks.

One must assume Battlefront did not choose to die yesterday. But to what extent did he choose to race?

Which leads me to respond to a couple of comments we received when I blogged about JT McNamara.

Horses’ rights?

One reader responded “The horses don’t have a say. But a horse that hates running will not get to the racetrack more than a couple of times. A reluctant horse wins no races”.

This is to state the obvious. Good racehorses clearly enjoy running. The best also appear to respond well to the rigours of racing. Yet there is a big difference between gallivanting about the fields and competitive racing for human enjoyment. Which is the key: this is a sport that is, ultimately, for human titillation.

It would be hard to argue that a horse collapsing as it galloped of its own volition would be down to anything more than exuberance and equine joie de vivre. But who is to know the impact of additional human encouragement in the form of a lifetime being schooled to push a body – however thoroughbred – to its limits?

The post-mortem will soon establish the cause of Battlefront’s death, and until then we cannot be sure of the extent to which he suffered before Katie Walsh, as experienced and professional (although, like McNarama, amateur) a jockey as you could hope to find, realised he was not well.

And in lay terms (and some may argue, clumsy), with Battlefront we have a situation akin to that of Fabrice Muamba, the Bolton footballer who nearly died on the pitch from a congenital heart defect that no-one knew about.

Let us assume, as with Muamba, that the medical attention Battlefront received was the very best available. But Muamba is alive. Battlefront is not. Which leads us back to an undeniable truth: Battlefront did not “choose” to lead a racehorse’s life, however cosseted and gilded the industry points out that may be.

And so on to another comment I received after writing about McNamara’s terrible injuries. “Sentimental rubbish,” offered one reader. “The jockeys, trainers, horses, yes, they know when they cannot make a fence and stop. Real racegoers all understand the dangers in the sport, in fact all sports that involve horses.”

Extreme sport

Which misrepresents the fundamental point. Horse racing is undeniably goosebump-pricking fun, largely because – yes – it is incredibly dangerous. It is indeed, as my colleagues at Channel 4 Sport have dubbed it, “the original extreme sport”.

And there are few races as extreme or exhilarating as the Grand National. The gust of wind that buffets the face if you are standing close to a rail, as whatever is left of the 40 odd runners stampede to Aintree’s famous finish, is as breathtaking an experience as you will find in the entire world of sport. Therein lies its enduring popularity.

But it is dishonest to suggest it is anything other than expressly for human entertainment. And as everybody knows, jockeys and horses will sometimes get hurt and sometimes die.

Sometimes the debate becomes one of statistics. The equine fatality rate at the Grand National is double that across jump racing as a whole. This death rate has crept over 3 per cent in the past.  Few sports, except perhaps base jumping, pose such risks to humans.

The new Aintree fences may improve the odds for both jockey and horse somewhat, but at what ratio do we decide that horse racing has become “safe”?  Or is the argument itself fallacious? For the horses do not, whatever the apologists may argue, choose to be there.

Humans and horses are not equal. If they were, humans would all be vegans and wear shoes made of hemp. But horse racing is fun. That is why humans enjoy it. And it is a sport erected on a hypocrisy. Get over it.

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