Winning my race for life

“I WANT to let people know I’m all right,” says the jump jockey Brian Toomey by way of introduction.

“I’ve had lots of falls, and broken and fractured loads of bones, but I’ve never broken a head before.”

And he’s not joking.

For, although the Irish blarney punctuating the conversation is infectious, this is the interview that the 24-year-old’s loved 
ones, including his girlfriend Amy Ryan, never expected him to be carrying out.

After his horse Solway Dandy stepped at the third from last flight at Perth, the horse pitched his jockey head first onto the “good to firm” ground and Toomey’s brain swelling became so serious that his family were told that he would not survive the night.

That he did not, after surgeons cut away a significant portion of his skull’s right side, is, in many respects, the racing miracle of 2013, more so than his great friend and hero AP McCoy landing his record-breaking 4,000th winner exactly a week ago at Towcester.

Four months after the near-tragedy, Toomey was speaking just hours before he was readmitted into hospital to have a large metal plate inserted into his head to make his skull more stable.

It is another obstacle in a remarkable race for life in which he joked that “he could touch the side of his brain” because there was such a large depression left by the life-and-death surgery that he underwent on the night of July 4.

The North Yorkshire jockey’s future is far from certain. He would love to race again as he glances across the yard to the racehorses boxed at the famous Hambleton Lodge stables run by his girlfriend’s father Kevin, but it is now slowly dawning on him that he will be denied a licence on medical grounds.

And he’s not prepared to defy the wishes of his family – the people who spent hours, then days, and then weeks, pacing the wards of a Dundee intensive care unit as they waited – and waited – for the County Limerick-born rider to emerge from his medically-induced coma. They endured a living hell as they watched Toomey on the brink of death before he returned to life.

The realisation clearly hurts. Horses have been his life since he rode his first pony on his father’s farm in the Emerald Isle.

“I want to be a millionaire. Any ideas?” he asks with the mischievous grin that, thankfully, remains unscathed by this trauma.

Toomey, whose cousin and childhood friend John Thomas McNamara was left paralysed following a horrendous fall at the Cheltenham Festival in March, was never going to become a “millionaire” – his word of the morning – as a jump jockey. Five seasons as a professional had yielded just over 50 winners.

“I would like to have won a big race, a Cheltenham Festival winner… I wasn’t going to be champion jockey,” he says. “I’m good at my job but I wanted to be very good at my job.”

And so to Perth to ride Solway Dandy for the first time for Lisa Harrison. A first ride for the trainer, the horse was the 11-4 favourite for the 5pm handicap hurdle – even though the six-year-old had no winning form.

Yet, after the first flight, it was clear that Solway Dandy was not jumping fluently and was already beaten as horse and jockey approached the third last obstacle at the picturesque Tayside track.

“I just thought one more hurdle, I was going to pull him up, but he just collapsed into the flight,” says Toomey. “I just hit the ground head first.

“I didn’t have the time to get my arms out to save me and break the fall.

“I’ve dislocated both my shoulders doing that in separate falls previously – that is agony. That hurts more than having your skull removed.”

Toomey’s condition was so desperate that he could not even be airlifted to hospital in Dundee because flying would have exacerbated the swelling even further. He had to make 
the journey by road as his life slipped away.

Racing had been told to expect the worst.

“I don’t really remember the first month in hospital because I was on so many painkillers,” he continues.

“There were a lot of things that I wasn’t aware about. But they phoned my family up and said I was going to pass away.

“Amy’s parents, Kevin and Jill, were brilliant. They got a plane sent to Ireland to pick my Mum and Dad up, and got them to hospital.

“I had 15 weeks in hospital, first Ninewells in Dundee and then the James Cook at Middlesbrough.You don’t realise the amount of people who care. Everyone came, including AP McCoy.

“My aunt was over from Ireland, she’s a nurse, and she was very, very negative. She knew how serious it was, but my great mate Brian Hughes, the former champion conditional, had none of it – he told her to be more positive. Good old Brian, that’s the spirit! He never lets you down. Racing people, they were there every day for me.”

Even now Toomey is blissfully unaware of how lucky he was to cheat death – he says he would have liked a skull fragment as a souvenir – and the scale of the ordeal for his family.

As she comes in after riding out in the morning mizzle on the gallops nestled on the summit of Sutton Bank in the Hambleton Hills, Toomey’s girlfriend Amy Ryan – the 2012 champion apprentice – is still bristling with anger about some of the media intrusion at the time.

She was receiving phone calls from national journalists as she raced from Haydock, where she had been riding, to her boyfriend’s bedside knowing that there was a chance he would be dead by the time she arrived – or paralysed if he ever recovered.

Ryan is even more annoyed that Solway Dandy’s trainer never got in touch. “Not even a letter,” she says.

Worse was to come. Just over three weeks later and 24-year-old Ryan, on her first day back in the saddle, suffered a hideous fall from Bogart in the Sky Bet Dash at York.

The horse’s saddle slipped and many of her 19 rivals galloped over her as this field of sprinters headed towards the winning line at upwards of 40mph.

Once she had got to her feet, another miracle, her first thoughts were for Toomey – and the anguish that he would be faced with. Fortunately he was not watching Channel Four’s coverage, still lost in his fog of semi-consciousness.

“Mine is an injury that is mendable,” she says. “With Brian, it’s a case of wait and see.”

She did not race again in 2013 and will wait until next year before deciding when to return to competitive action, though she rides out at each morning for her father, whose Astaire and Hot Streak are leading contenders for next year’s 2000 Guineas after their one-two in Newmarket’s prestigious Middle Park Stakes.

“Brian came first,” she says. “That’s a joke,” he laughs. And, when digged in the ribs, he looks adoringly into her eyes: “You did.”

Yet, while Flat racing is already anticipating next spring’s Classics, the “future” is not even contemplated by this likable couple who have been brought even closer together by adversity – “she was a chippy Flat jockey and I was a jump jockey so it took a while,” says Toomey by way of interjection.

After almost two months in hospital in Middlesbrough where Toomey could not come to terms with a programme of occupational therapy to help him overcome memory loss, and take a few simple steps, he has blossomed since spending a fortnight at Oaksey House in Lambourn – the rehabilitation centre run by the Injured Jockeys Fund.

Work will begin on a second centre in Malton this month and be named after Jack Berry, the Leeds-born trainer and fundraiser who is the driving force behind the IJF.

For the next six months after this week’s surgery, Oaksey House will closely supervise Toomey’s recovery – a process more advanced than the exercises given to concussion victims because of the scale of the trauma.

Yet, like all jockeys, Toomey is an impatient sort and it will take time to adjust to the knowledge that his name will never appear on the Cheltenham Festival’s roll of honour – or that he won’t ride another winner for the Grand National-winning trainers Sue and Harvey Smith who were supporting him with rides shortly before tragedy struck.

“I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy,” he says as he pats the couple’s Jack Russell dog Paddy for comfort amid the gallows humour.

“When I first came out of hospital and walked across the yard to those horse boxes, Amy, and her Mum and Dad, would look out of the window to see I didn’t fall over.

“You just don’t think it will happen to you. What happened to JT McNamara, it didn’t put me off.

“I’m not quite as bad – he has three little kids and used to break in horses for AP’s owner JP McManus. I rode with him as a kid. He was a legend. Put JT up on any type of horse and he could get it jumping. He was one of the best. Still is, but can only breathe about 35 to 40 minutes a time unaided.

“I couldn’t even tell you what I’m going to do in the future. If I rode, the plate in my head will be at risk if I had a fall. I will be involved with horses. I would like to train, but have you heard of a 24-year-old trainer?

“I’ve done a bit of wheeling and dealing in the past, buying and selling horses. It’s a good craic. AP is always telling me to look out a horse for him, perhaps that is why he has had so many winners.

“I will, but I’ve told him that he won’t be able to ride it – the odds will be too short. AP, he said in hospital that he thought I was a soft ******. He’s changed. He said I’m a hard b******. He says I’m the toughest lad around, a bit of an ironman. That’s praise. He’s so good for our sport, we couldn’t ask for a better ambassador.”

As he prepared to undergo surgery, Toomey’s jocularity contrasted with the pensiveness etched across his girlfriend’s face.

She gently admonished him for standing outside for too long in the cold posing for photographs, ironically with Bogart, who added to the couple’s ordeal when his saddle slipped at York.

“I have been lucky, so they say, but I won’t realise that for a long time,” adds Brian Toomey.

“It could be worse. I could be dead.”

Centre will be fitting tribute to tireless work of horse trainer

WHEN Jack Berry House opens in Malton next year, it will be a fitting tribute to the tireless work of the Leeds-born trainer since he helped to instigate the Injured Jockeys Fund in 1964.

It was set up by, amongst others, Berry and the late John Oaksey – the great racing journalist – after Yorkshire-based jockey Paddy Farrell broke his back when falling from Border Flight at The Chair fence in that year’s Grand National.

With another jockey, Tim Brookshaw, also paralysed from a fall in a hurdle race at Aintree weeks earlier the charity began with a bucket collection at Wetherby racecourse – Farrell was attached at the time to nearby stables of Charlie Hall.

A front page letter in The Sporting Life on March 28, 1964, launched the appeal with the most poignant of words. It read: “Paddy Farrell, who broke his back in last week’s Grand National, has been told by doctors that, so far as medical science can predict, he will never be able to walk again.

“His fall and its tragic results have brought home more clearly than ever the dreadful risks that National Hunt jockeys face so cheerfully for our entertainment.

“Paddy has a wife and four young children to support and, of the millions who watched the Grand National on television or at Aintree, many will want to help this gallant and popular man to fight the cruel disability with which Fate has burdened him.”

The tireless work of the IJF – its vice president is North Yorkshire-based Berry – saw it pay for holidays for stricken jockeys. Then physiotherapy and other treatment. And then its work took on a whole new dimension when Oaksey House opened in Lambourn in 2009 to provide residential and rehabilitation work for injured riders.

It has already proved to be priceless. It cut months off Malton-born jockey Andrew Tinkler’s recovery from knee surgery; it is transforming young rider Gary Rutherford’s recovery from a twisted hip and its occupational health staff will offer specialist brain therapy to Brian Toomey. Take Danny Cook, who is attached to the Malton yard of Brian Ellison. A fall destroyed one of his kneecaps at Wetherby on Boxing Day 2011. He should have been off for a year. He was back riding within six months thanks to Oaksey House and is now widely respected as one of Yorkshire’s most accomplished riders.

He attributes this to the one-to-one care that can be afforded to jockeys by the IJF team of medics – the only downside, said Cook, was that he was so far from home while undergoing his rehab work in the state-of-the-art Oaksey House gym.

As such, Berry says the need for such a centre in the North is overwhelming and work begins shortly on a £3.5m complex next to Malton and Norton

Rugby Club. Having defied his fellow trustees, including the charity’s patron Princess Anne, when he came up with the notion of Oaksey House, he says he cannot think of a more fitting way to mark the charity’s half-century.

“It’s going to be brilliant and is what has been needed for so long in the North,” he said. “I’ve always said my biggest objective was to see this through before I’m carted off in a box!

“I was down at the fence (in the ’64 National) and knew straight away it was bad for Paddy. The cost of building is not cheap, and running the place will need around £250,000 a year, so I will continue to twist the arms of racing folk.”

He will. For, as IJF president John Francome, the former champion jockey and ex-Channel Four pundit, observed so accurately: “I’ve never known anyone who can work as hard as Jack. He’s like a Duracell battery. If he could get twenty quid for the IJF by walking to Scarborough in one shoe, he would.”

Find out more about the IJF at www.ijf.org.uk or support one of their trade stands at racecourses across Britain in the run up to Christmas.