Elsevier

Injury

Volume 41, Issue 5, May 2010, Pages 533-539
Injury

Fall and injury incidence rates of jockeys while racing in Ireland, France and Britain

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.injury.2009.05.009Get rights and content

Abstract

This article presents and analyses injury incidence rates for amateur and professional racing jockeys in Ireland, France and Britain by means of a retrospective study and review of published data.

Amateur jump racing was seen to have the highest fall risk in these three countries (between 115 and 140 falls/1000 rides). Jump racing also had the highest rates of injury/ride amongst both amateur and professional jockeys. Flat racing, however, had the highest rates of injuries/fall (34–44%). Of all the injuries in both jump and flat racing populations of amateur and professional jockeys, 15% were concussive head injuries, and more than half of these involved loss of consciousness. Professional jump jockeys in Ireland fell less frequently than those in France or Britain. Their injury/fall rate and injury/ride rate were highest in Britain. Professional flat racing jockeys in France had the lowest rates of injuries/fall and injuries/ride, while those in Ireland had the highest.

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Methods

Sufficient epidemiological data were needed to categorise and prioritise the different types of injury involved in equestrian racing and to compare the collected data with the already published figures. Relevant literature was found through the PubMed, Medline and Sport Discus databases and Google and Google Scholar, during 2006 and 2007. Keywords used for searches included equestrian injury, horse racing injury, jockey injury, head injury, sports injury, horse injury, brain injury and

Ireland

Eight years of jockey injury data for jump, point-to-point and flat racing are summarised in Table 1a, compared in Table 1b and presented in detail on an annualised basis in Table A1. All injuries associated with these data led to jockeys being ‘stood down’ from riding for various periods of time.

From the Poisson regression it was seen that the yearly incidence rates for concussions/ride, falls/ride and injuries/ride did not change significantly. An exception for this was for jump racing, where

Discussion

Ireland, France and Britain were the three racing jurisdictions around the world for which detailed levels of accident and injury data were available. Unfortunately, this information was neither reported nor presented uniformly. The severity of concussion was defined using different criteria after 2003 for the British data, the time off work arising from an injury was characterised differently and not every country presented annual injury rates. Presenting such data annually in a harmonised

Conclusions

Horse racing is a high-risk sport with high incidence rates of concussion and head injury amongst flat and jump racing jockeys. Of all jockeys, it is amateur jump racing jockeys who fell most frequently in Ireland, France and Britain. Jump racing also had the highest rates of injury/ride amongst both amateur and professional jockeys. Flat racing, however, had the highest rates of injuries/fall (34–44%). While there is a paucity of worldwide equestrian injury data and a lack of uniformity in the

Conflict of interest

The authors have no conflict of interest in this work.

Acknowledgements

Financial support in the form of a PhD stipend was provided to MAFR by the Turf Club during the course of this research. Dr. Benoit LeMasson of France Galop kindly provided the authors with French jockey injury data. The assistance of Mr. Peter T. O’Neill of the UCD School of Electrical, Electronic & Mechanical Engineering with the R statistical analysis software is gratefully acknowledged.

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