Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Real life | 29 October 2015

First time over the jumps with Darcy was a three-Voltarol day

‘This is a two Voltarol day,’ I thought, as I popped another pill and settled into the bath after Darcy’s first hurdling session. Well, three Voltarol if you count the one I gave to the young jockey who parted company with his horse at the first hurdle just in front of me.

He knelt on the ground wearing a stoical expression as he cradled his arm. He has been doing this since he was 15. When he is older he will be able to tell his children, in all seriousness, that he went to the school of hard knocks and the college of crashing into hurdles.

‘If there are bones sticking out,’ I thought, because the jockey tea room talk about injuries nonchalantly suffered is always luridly laid on for my benefit every time I nip in for a cuppa, ‘then that’s it. I’m not doing this any more.’ (My mother rings me up daily to announce, ‘Listen here. You’re not to do it. Do you hear me?’)

But he hadn’t broken his arm. ‘It’s just bruised,’ said another jockey who rushed to help. This was a relief, although ‘just bruised’ is something they apply to pretty much everything in the life of a jockey. As a trainer once said to the 18-year-old Tony McCoy as two splintered bone ends pressed through his jodhpurs, ‘Are you sure you’ve broken it?’

I had been hanging on to the reins a bit tighter than was strictly fair to Darcy as a group of four of us, the trainer in the lead, began the session by pirouetting towards a line of jumps in his practice field.

I say pirouette because that is the best way to describe how excited racehorses approach the start of a line of jumps.

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