Disaster

It gives me terrible sadness to observe that yesterday I received the worst reminder that one should always expect the unexpected.  We suffered a tragedy yesterday as Kadouchski (pictured two weeks before his death, doing one of the things he most enjoyed, playing in the mud; and then six times last year, including thrice on the day he gave Hannah her first winner; and then finally and fatefully heading out onto the track with his usual gusto yesterday) was fatally injured at Market Rasen, and one couldn't take bolts from the blue of that magnitude too often.  He was always a very sound horse, and I'm afraid that his soundness allowed me to overlook the important fact that one should not ask horses to race on bad ground; and, I am afraid, the ground at Market Rasen yesterday was in atrocious condition.  Still, I have nobody to blame but myself for this lovely horse's death: nobody forced me to run him.  But, as you'll see below, I should have had more sense.

Kadou's younger half-brother Frankie (Douchkirk) should have run too at Market Rasen yesterday in the novice hurdle.  However, he sprained a fetlock galloping with Kadou on the Wednesday so he couldn't run.  The following is an excerpt from an email which I sent his owners the next day, explaining why we'll have to wait a bit longer before he resumes:

"...Still, looking on the bright side, if we were going to have to defer a race, this is the one to defer: very few of you would have been able to attend, and I was already starting to get cold feet about running bearing in mind that the ground has been listed the past three days as good to firm. With the weather that we've been having, I've rather got out of the habit of being wary of firm ground, but that might now be an issue again. Market Rasen always used to keep their track with some give in the ground throughout the summer, but that was when Nick Patton was clerk of the course. More recently, under different auspices, when they've said it's fast ground in the summer, it's been very fast. I had a few runners there last summer and it more or less put me off summer jumping altogether: one week I went to Market Rasen for a jumps meeting and Yarmouth for a flat meeting and the Flat jockeys were complaining that Yarmouth was too firm, and yet I'd have said that Market Rasen was the firmer of the two tracks I'd been to that week. So it's probably a blessing in disguise not to be running a nice young horse there if the ground is indeed on the fast side. I'm going to run Kadouchski, but he's a proven tough old horse who has shown that he can run on anything - and even with him I'm feeling slightly uneasy about it."

The ground wasn't as firm at Market Rasen as I've seen it.  By Flat racing standards, it varied in parts between good and good to firm, which probably made it vary between good to firm and firm by jumping standards.  (Its official rating was good, good to firm in places).  However, as I only discovered subsequently, the problem was not primarily its firmness, but its roughness: the surface of the downhill bend out of the back straight and into the straight was extremely loose, chewed-up and uneven, with a firm base underneath it.  In winter, such a damaged surface is not really a problem as the ground is on the soft side, but when it has a firm summer base, such conditions are lethal.

Anyway, sensible trainers withdrew their horses. Phil Kirby, a trainer whom I like and respect, took out two of his three runners. Sadly, I allowed Kadou to run, a mistake which I will regret for the rest of my life. The field set off at the start of the back straight. He bowled along, jumped the first three hurdles nicely, set off down the hill on the inside - and then lost his pitch, clearly in trouble, and William tried to pull him up. Sadly, Kadou's tremendous heart meant that he took some pulling up and unfortunately jumped the first hurdle in the straight before William had got him back to a halt. William immediately jumped off and it was clear that Kadou had suffered a bad injury to his off-hind leg, probably in the pastern/fetlock area.

The racecourse vets were extremely professional, sensible and helpful. A fractured pastern was diagnosed and the leg was heavily bandaged. Kadou was clearly able to travel, so eventually we set off for home. We stopped off at the Newmarket Equine Hospital on the way into town at around 9.30. Charlie Smith, an excellent vet, met us there. He and I were both hopeful that the injury would be nothing more serious than a clean break, which would heal with rest, because Kadou walked surprisingly well for a horse with a broken leg to the X-ray unit, able to put a small amount of weight on the leg. Unfortunately, the X-ray plates were like stills from a horror movie: there were multiple fractures in the pastern and some of the pieces of bone had moved. Neither rest nor surgery offered any realistic hope of doing anything other than keeping the horse in pain for as long as he lived. Even though euthanasia was the only sensible and humane option, I just couldn't face the idea of asking for my favourite horse ever to be put down, and made the suggestion that, even though I didn't know what sort of miracle I was hoping for, we do nothing until the morning. Charlie, sensibly, pointed out that the situation would be no different in the morning and all that that would achieve would be subjecting the horse to a night of pain. I duly did my dear, dear friend and faithful servant the good turn which I owed him - ie giving permission for his suffering to end - but it absolutely tore me apart to do so.

It is true that the majority of horses who raced at Market Rasen yesterday have returned home sound. Given a different roll of the dice, Kadou would have done so too. However, the terrible state of the track there presented an unacceptable risk of injury, and in retrospect I should not have run him. There were 11 runners in our race, and sadly he was one of the two who broke down (the other being Ranjobaie, who suffered a serious tendon injury coming down the hill on the final circuit). I am paranoid about allowing horses to work around bends on firm ground which has a rough, loose surface - which is the classic scenario for causing a hind pastern fracture - and yet I asked Kadou to do so. I wish that I'd walked the entire track before the race - but, then again, I'd have probably run anyway, reasoning that most of the others were doing so, and the majority were coming home unhurt.

In 1999 I trained a lovely three-year-old called Warring Kingdom, like Kadou a sound horse. He was fatally injured at the final Musselburgh meeting of the season, which was run on fast ground which was very damaged after their season of racing and which was loose, rough and slippery on the top. Warring Kingdom had already won twice at Musselburgh that season and held the track record there for two miles. He was travelling very easily under John Egan going round the last bend, but then seemed to falter and John pulled him up straightaway. The horse was holding up his hind leg and the pastern was clearly irreparably shattered. He was put down on the spot. When the knacker wagon appeared to remove his corpse, its back ramp was lowered and I was aghast to see that there was already one dead horse in it. I was told that this was a two-year-old trained by Mark Johnston who had broken his leg at the same spot in the first race.

John then rode a horse for William Haggas in the race after ours. The horse slipped on the same spot but kept his feet and was not damaged. After three incidents within five races on the same spot on the bend, the stewards inspected the track and found that the bend was rough and slippery at that stage. Racing was eventually given the go-ahead to continue, but the jockeys were advised to keep at least five metres out from the rail around the bend, which seemed an odd way of going about things.

Anyway, a year or two later, one summer Long Hill grass gallop was opened up, as usual. The gallop on Long Hill is straight uphill for four and a bit furlongs, and then climbs around to the right, with the camber falling away to the left. The late Fred Rickaby remarked to me that he hoped that I wasn't going to gallop horses up there because when he had been working in Newmarket in the '30s (Fred emigrated to South Africa after the war and did not then return home until after he had retired in the '80s) that gallop was notorious for horses fracturing their pasterns, because of the reverse camber on the bend. I assured him that all we ever do on it was (and still is) gallop the straight four and then immediately start to pull up before we go around the bend. But, would you believe it, the day after this conversation with Fred, I saw a dead horse on that gallop, trained I think by the late Michael Jarvis but I could be wrong there, about halfway around the bend.

Anyway, as you'll understand from those reflections, I am absolutely paranoid about asking horses to gallop on firm ground around bends whose surface is rough and loose. To my eternal regret, yesterday I asked my favourite horse ever to do just that, and I will have to live with the consequences for the rest of my life. There is plenty to contemplate there - and I just hope that those responsible for the preparation of our tracks,and for the concept of 'summer jumping', devote some contemplation to the subject too. There would be uproar if the track for the Cheltenham Festival, or any of the other leading jumps meetings, was presented in the state that yesterday's track at Market Rasen was in. The horses who run at the minor meetings aren't the headline makers of the Festival, but in their own way they are every bit as special (and more so in Kadouchski's case, in my eyes anyway) and the standards of acceptability should be the same irrespective of the level of competition. I know that I have nobody to blame but myself because I and I alone took the decision to run Kadou yesterday, but it should not be the case that one should get to the track, inspect it oneself, find it in dangerous condition and then wrestle with the dilemma of whether the level of danger presented is unacceptably high.

The photographs of different parts of the downhill home bend do not, incidentally, give a realistic impression, making it look better than it really was.  These are two-dimensional images which underplay the unevenness of the surface; and the fact that there was a 15-minute storm before and during the second race has made the track look wetter than it was, thus underplaying its firmness.