Graham Lee: Jockey who was paralysed hopeful about breakthrough hailed by Spinal Research chair Tara Howell

A very different experience awaits him when he returns to the racecourse on Wednesday this week.

In November 2023, he suffered a devastating fall from his horse, Ben Macdui, as it came out of the stalls at Newcastle and was paralysed from the neck down.

“All I remember of that day was the second I hit the ground and I went, Oh, my Lord, I'm in big, big trouble,” he tells The Yorkshire Post on video call from his home near Bedale.

He cannot remember anything from about 30 seconds after the fall until two weeks later, and, as the second anniversary of the accident approaches next month, attempts to recover mobility have not worked.

“I’ve got nothing,” he says of rehabilitation. “Every day was groundhog day. You just think, I can’t keep living like this. Then I met Tara.”

That’s Tara Howell, chair of Spinal Research, the charity which is the beneficiary of the Wetherby’s opening meeting this week.

Tara also suffered a spinal injury, becoming tetraplegic after being thrown from her horse in 2014. But she has news which offers hope not only to herself but all people who believed - or were told - that they would never walk again.

A few years ago she was involved in the Pathfinder2 clinical trial, funded by Spinal Research, which has since been peer-reviewed and published, and now a new machine, the ARC-EX, made by a company called Onward, is being prepared for the market.

Tara, 54, of Brandsby in North Yorkshire, says: “It is a new machine that stimulates the spinal cord and basically wakes up any nerves in spare tissue left in the spinal cord. In most - 99 per cent - of spinal cord injuries, there's always some spinal cord left. Most injuries are what we call contusion injuries, where basically the spinal cord gets squashed. So what the machine does is basically, I call it jump-starting a car again - scientists get very upset when I say that - but basically, in a very unscientific way, it jangles everything up, wakes everything up.”

Then there is special activity-based rehab while the spinal cord is more “awake” in order to retrain the nerves and muscles in an attempt to restore function. Its effectiveness will vary from person to person, she says, because it depends on what part of the spinal cord is left and what nerves are in it, as well as an individual’s recovery rate.

Nevertheless, says Tara, “several people have asked me: ‘How big a breakthrough is this?’ And it's really hard to overstate it, to be honest with you, because the first incidence of spinal cord injury was recorded in Egyptian hieroglyphs, like 1,000s of years ago, and ever since then it's been considered to be incurable. There was nothing that could be done. And that's what, even now, people are still saying: when you get this injury, oh, that's it. ‘You'll never walk again. You'll never do XYZ again’.”

The treatment has demonstrated otherwise, she believes.

“We had 10 people on the trial that I was doing,” says Tara, “and in that 10 people, we had one person who started taking unaided steps. We had one person have their bowel and bladder function restored after just three months of a year-long trial, we had somebody else who recovered all of their torso functions.

“There are various grades of what they call the ASIA (American Spinal Injury Association) grades, where they basically look at whether you're sensory and motor incomplete, or just sensory incomplete, or just motor incomplete. The highest grade is A, that's what's known as the least amount of movement and sensation, all the way through to D, which is quite incomplete. And this person went from being an ASIA A to an ASIA C, which meant that their potential for gaining movement and sensory function was a lot higher, and that was just in 10 people.

“More remarkably, all of those people were at least five years post-injury, so considered to be chronic. Therefore, this treatment - and again, I quote this and it seems incredible, but it's true - it is the first function-restoring treatment for spinal cord injury in history. What it demonstrates is that it's the harbinger of further treatments because it proves that the spinal cord can be improved, even years and years after injury, and that is something that previously was thought impossible.”

The process does not involve invasive surgery and, with the device putting electrodes on the skin, can be done at home. It is hoped the ARC-EX will be licensed in the UK over the coming days.

Tara stresses that results will vary - “this isn’t a cure” - but it is major progress. Raising funds, of course, is what will lead to other discoveries and work is going on to help design remedies for other difficulties presented by spinal cord injuries.

“For a normal member of the public, you just think that it's all about being paralysed and not being able to walk, and that's almost like the least of it,” says Tara. “It steals so many functions, like bowel and bladder regulation, body temperature, blood pressure, breathing function - so many things depending on where the injury is. Curing paralysis will be a journey of restoring the various functions stolen by this illness, and this is the starting step on the journey.”

In Graham’s case, even a small amount of recovered function would change his life and the breakthrough which Tara discusses has given the Galway-born rider and his family hope.

He says: “If I got one hand to manoeuvre a power chair, that would be transformative for me, give me a little bit of independence, I could drive into another room instead of having to ask them to be wheeled here, there and everywhere.”

Asked how he has dealt with the last two years, Graham, 49, says “not very well” but praises the way in which his wife Becky, 51, children Amy and Robbie, and the horse racing community have supported him.

“Sport is tough, but racing seems to rally around better than any other sport,” he says, while also praising the strength of his wife.

Becky says: “I don't think anyone knows how strong they can be, until you have to be.”

It is an extreme change for Graham, going from a very active sportsman - he won the Grand National in 2004 riding Amberleigh House before switching to flat racing and won the Ascot Gold Cup 10 years ago - to being paralysed.

He says: “I think what's difficult for Becky as much as me is, when I was a jump jockey, I had all these injuries, fractures, breaks - head injuries, everything. You think you're indestructible. You get broken, you're on the ground, you're thinking, right I need to get back ASAP before you even get into an ambulance. You just have that mentality - you always get back. ‘The doctor says it'll be three months, I'll be back in two’, and you feel indestructible.

“But that's what I can't get my head around with this injury, is… I am broken. If someone said to me, I ‘can't’ or I ‘won't’, I always kind of did, and you work away around the obstacles, but there's no way around this one.”

Being around horse racing at the moment is still difficult and he says his recent attendance at the Juddmonte in York was “really tough”.

As a former rider herself, Tara knows well the feeling of watching others get to take part in something she so loved.

Getting the word out about these advances, therefore, is so important.

“This area has been chronically underfunded because everybody thought it was impossible,” she says. “Now we want to get out there and shout and raise awareness about the fact that these things can now happen, but we now need the funding. We’ve got the science, we need the funding to get them delivered.”

The Opening Meeting supporting Spinal Research at Wetherby Racecourse takes place on Wednesday. Tickets: www.wetherbyracing.co.uk