Jeanette Brakewell and Let’s Dance, falling on course at this year’s edition of Badminton. Jeanette sustained broken ribs, but the horse was uninjured. Photo by Lulu Kyriacou
I already touched on this in my last blog but you cannot open any sort of equestrian publication at the moment without reading about the latest eventing fatality, be it either yet another theory as to why, or another teary eulogy. The trouble with all of it is that the few facts we have got are being rather well hidden under a flood of social media driven emotion and that is not going to help find a solution to the problem. If there even is one…
So let’s look at some facts, and then perhaps next time there is a tragedy, we won’t be so blinded by the tears that we forget to ask the right questions. First the numbers. The list most commonly quoted is the one published by Horsetalk, a New Zealand based website, here. Admittedly it is an impressive list, but Horsetalk would not themselves claim it to be 100% accurate.
First, the rider deaths on it include two nothing to do with eventing. Yes, they were jumping, but if they are included, there are one or two hunting accidents that need to go in as well. So since 1997 there have been 53 deaths right? Wrong. The list, wherever it is published will not contain the names of anyone who was transported alive off course and died subsequently of their injuries later. There is at least one of those I know about.
The severely injured list should not really be there at all, without some sort of qualifying criteria. Faith Cook is included, but although hospitalised at the time, she made a full recovery. Unlike Pepo Puch or Claire Lomas. David Herron’s fall at Burgie has not made the list at all, but his injuries were life changing.
Nor do you need to be eventing to have a life changing fall. Look at the actor Christopher Reeve. That was just horses being horses. Or Courtney King-Dye, she wasn’t involved in an eventing horse fall either. So I don’t think we should be including the ‘nearly’ falls in any figures, they don’t just happen in eventing and it skews the stats.
Statistics. Lies, damn lies and statistics, didn’t some wise person say? Well in 1999 the British Journal of Sports Medicine published a paper by Dr. Bruce Pax. It is the one that provided the most used quote about the dangers of riding being more lethal than motor sport. Here is the link. He worked out that, based on time spent in the saddle, riding at the highest level was 180 times more dangerous than motor racing. Superficially the numbers bear him out because in one of those spooky coincidences, there have been 53 deaths in Formula One cars (though not always in F1 races). The same number, but actually over a much longer period, an extra 40 years. So Dr. Pax was right in spades, especially as there have only been FOUR such deaths since 2004.
But recently there has been another piece of research done in Australia that suggests time spent in the saddle should not be the criteria for making the calculation of relative risk and that it should be measured by jump attempts, because it is jumping that causes the deaths and then the danger rating changes entirely. Think about it. An F1 race lasts two hours. There are about 15 per year with 20 starters in each. That’s 600 chances per year for someone to have an accident. Then look at horse trials, even if you only count 4* events, the maths isn’t hard. Six events, average say 60 starters in each times the amount of jumping efforts on course. Let’s call it 25, just for arguments sake. And right there, just at 4* events, in one season, are 9,000 chances to have a fatality. Frankly it’s a wonder we don’t have more when you look at it like that. Eventing safety might be better than we think.
If you scroll down to the bottom of that study, you will find an interesting list that debunks another two myths. The first is that table fences are the root of all evil. The second is that all information is carefully collected.You will see a great many ‘not recorded’ in that column and also that where it is recorded, the type of fence varies dramatically. If you just take the falls where the fence type is mentioned, just as many, if not more falls have been caused by logs/roll tops. And talking of fences, earlier this year, the FEI presented the findings of an independent body looking at falls.
No one seems to have paid much attention, but this saw another myth debunked…the one that says making the fences collapsible is the way forward. Turns out doing so won’t stop horses falling, the audit found that, based on the information they had, that more horses fell and were injured at the jumps with frangible pins.
Finally, on the Horsetalk fatalities list, there are an enormous amount of horses and it isn’t complete by any stretch of the imagination. But people need to stop quoting that because many of those horses fell on the flat, or went lame after completing or had an heart attack at the finish. Going through it, and just keeping the horses that were catastrophically injured through a horse fall AT A JUMP since 2005, there were 43. Still too many but almost 50% less than the original list. If we are going to discuss and improve safety, the figures from those dead horses needs to be included because if the rider was relatively undamaged, that was luck. Chances are whatever caused those horse falls was exactly the same things that caused the ones with rider fatalities, but are never included in the stats…If they were, that would make nearly 100 lethal falls in twenty years. Perhaps not a lie exactly, but maybe a fatal sin of omission.
