United Kingdom: A race that wasn’t meant to be safe

Peter Scudamore

The Daily Mail

After last week’s tragedy at the Grand National, everyone’s clamoring for the world’s toughest steeplechase to be made safer, said Peter Scudamore. Even for me, a former jockey, it was “agonizing” to watch “two horses killed on live television, a winning horse that seemed close to collapse as it passed the finishing post, and a winning jockey, Jason Maguire, hit with a five-day ban for excessive use of the whip.” One of the horses broke its neck at the fourth fence and died instantly, while the other broke its back in a fall at the sixth fence and suffered horribly before being put down. Another jockey is in a coma after a fall during an earlier race, when he was kicked at least once and nearly trampled.

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Still, trying to make the course easier would be counterproductive. Many of the safety measures that animal-rights advocates are calling for would actually make the course more dangerous. In recent years, for example, officials have made the fences smaller and the drops on their far sides less steep, with the perverse result that horses now run the course even faster, at speeds that increase the likelihood of collision. The Grand National has always been “a dangerous and potentially deadly race.” We jockeys accept that risk to ourselves and our mounts is part of our job. Indeed, it is what makes steeplechase racing “such a compelling spectator sport.”