This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Graham Lee is the only jockey to have won both the Grand National and the Ascot Gold Cup. His unique status is hardly surprising, given that so few top jockeys make the switch between jump and flat racing — not least because having managed to climb to the top in one code, it takes monumental self-belief to start all over again in another.

More often the switch comes through force of circumstance, such as when a flat jockey finds it too difficult to keep the weight off: the maximum flat weight is 10 stone, which is the minimum jump weight. Jim Crowley was one exception. He had ridden over 300 jump winners before making the reverse switch to the flat at the relatively old age of 27 — a hugely risky but successful decision. He was champion flat jockey in 2016 before being retained the same year by Hamdan al-Maktoum’s Shadwell stud, giving him the ride on a series of champions, including Baaeed and Battaash.

Graham Lee was one of the most successful jump jockeys ever, having managed the rare feat of riding over 1,000 winners, including the 2004 Grand National on Amberleigh House. But in 2012 he also decided to ride on the flat after a series of serious injuries. On average a jump jockey falls once every 28 rides and is injured every 250 rides. You essentially have to be mad to do it, in the certain knowledge that you will break bones by falling off a 70-stone horse travelling at up to 40 mph. Formula One drivers are pampered wusses compared with jump jockeys, who if they’re lucky will breaky only a collarbone, leg, shoulder, arm … you get the picture.

His head crashed to the ground as another horse galloped towards him from behind

Sean Bowen was leading last season’s Jump Jockeys Championship by more than 30 winners when he was put out of action for six weeks by a Boxing Day fall. On the final day of the season in April, he was pipped to the title by just two winners.

The next month he started this season’s campaign. Riding at Fontwell, his mount veered left and right then swerved sharply before the first hurdle. Bowen was catapulted forward over the jump. His head crashed to the ground as another horse galloped towards him from behind, clipping the bill of his cap with a hoof. As former jockey Mick Fitzgerald put it after the race: “He is literally millimetres away from crushing his skull.” Bowen walked away unscathed.

If you’re unlucky, however, you will not walk away. Last April, Graham Lee fractured his spine after his horse unseated him as the stalls opened at Newcastle Racecourse. He is now paralysed from the neck down.

The fact that the statistics show how much safer flat racing is — relatively, that is — with flat jockeys “only” falling once in every thousand rides and being injured every 2,000 rides, is now an irrelevance for Lee.

It can be easy for armchair racing fans to take jockeys for granted. Sometimes you scream at the terrible ride you think they’ve given a horse you’ve backed. Sometimes you purr with pleasure at how they managed to win. But we should never forget how heroic they are even for competing — because they don’t just risk paralysis.

In February 25-year-old Keagan Kirkby, who worked for former champion trainer Paul Nicholls, was riding in a point-to-point when his horse ran into the side of a fence, killing him instantly. The following month Stefano Cherchi, a 23-year-old flat jockey who rode more than a hundred winners in the UK before moving to Australia, died when his horse fell in a race at Canberra.

Racing has many problems. But with such heavy risks intrinsic to the sport, it can be proud of the Injured Jockeys Fund (IJF), a charity founded after both Tim Brookshaw and Paddy Farrell were paralysed by falls in the 1964 Grand National. Since then, the IJF has paid out more than £22m in grants and spent more than £75m on its three world-leading specialist medical centres, recuperation and accommodation.

In its 60 years it has helped more than 2,000 jockeys, every one of them a wonder of human endeavour.