Francis Woods touches the gash on his right brow and looks at the ooze on his finger. The wound hasn't yet closed. Last week at Goffs he placed his hand on the withers of a colt he'd been looking at to feel the joint and contours. Knowing what brats colts can be, he ran his fingers down the animal slowly so as not to spook him too much. The colt stayed still enough to let the jockey feel relaxed. It then wheeled around and in a flash lashed out.

"He nearly took my head off," says Woods. "I said to myself, `Jesus Christ, what a year this has been'. "

On May 23rd last, as he was driving towards Dunshaughlin, his car left the road. He had just returned from a trip down the country and had dropped off a friend in Navan before heading for home soon after 12.30 a.m.

All he knows about what happened are the pieces he can fit together from what the doctors and Gardai told him when he finally came to his senses some days later in the spinal unit of the Matter Hospital.

His car had ploughed through a hedge and had tumbled over a number of times before coming to rest in a field. No one else had been involved.

A local from the Kentstown area found him at 6.0 a.m., about five hours after the accident. He recognised Woods and his Finlay Motors, Newbridge-sponsored Ford Mondeo overturned on the grass and was certain that the jockey was dead. The Gardai were called and they, too, thought Woods was dead. He was lying motionless 10 yards from the car, cold and blue, having managed to crawl away from the vehicle before falling into unconsciousness.

Had it been winter Woods would certainly have perished from hypothermia.

As it was he was left with two crushed vertebrae in his neck, a broken wrist and a crushed brachial plexus in his shoulder, which had rammed his collar bone into the nerve channel in his arm. That is where the lasting damage was done.

This week Woods is waiting to hear the results of tests carried out at the Blackrock Clinic. Riding out for trainer Arthur Moore is a task he has not discharged for six months. Instead he offers his arm to a machine in one of the suites as a doctor sticks pins into the muscle to gauge which lines are open to his forearm and which are beyond repair. He will soon find out if an operation to move nerves from the back of his arm to the front biceps is a viable option. His career rests on it.

"I want the truth," he says. "I don't want people thinking one thing and telling me another. When I went to James Colville he sat me down and started talking about my arm. He could see in my eyes . . . the fear . . . and he stopped. He said to me: `Am I frightening you?' I said: `I'd rather hear the truth now. I don't want to hear it in six months time'."

The truth is that Woods's mind is also drifting to the festival racing that Leopardstown offers up at Christmas. His arm is a worry but his thoughts still revolve around the racecourse. Five rides a day, high-profile punters popping their helicopters on the golf course and shaping the bookies' odds, television, good prize-money and horses that will please or disappoint with the frenzy of Cheltenham just 12 weeks down the road.

He runs his right hand up and down the damaged arm, clenching his fists and cursing the night that has, for half a year, deprived him of not only a livelihood but a way of life.

"If I'd fallen off a bloody horse it would have been easier to take, but a bloody car crash. That annoys me more than anything else."

Having delved into faith healing, acupuncture, conventional physiotherapy and the remedies of herbalist and Meath Gaelic football manager Sean Boylan, Woods will let anyone work on him as long as they don't wave a knife at his arm. Why not, is his philosophy. His future, however, seems most probably linked with surgeons and although the experts he has spoken to have been unwaveringly positive about recovery, even that route is tinged with some uncertainty.

`Mentally it's harder than anything else," he says. "It's very, very hard mentally to pull yourself together and to have hope and confidence. But when I think of it, I think I was lucky, lucky to have gotten good horses, lucky to have had the winners I've had, lucky not to have been killed in a car crash, lucky to be not in the same position as Shane (Broderick). I can come to the gym. Shane is still stuck in the rehabilitation unit in Dun Laoghaire."

Woods earned his first ride in 1986, the only one he had that year, before becoming the champion claimer in 1988. Luck? He's been one of the top three jockeys for the last three years and last season rode the second most amount of winners in the country behind Charlie Swan. More luck?

In 1994 and a generation on from his father Paddy's double success in the Irish Grand National, Woods won his first on Son Of War, trained by Peter McCreery, before repeating the act in 1996 on Arthur Moore's Feathered Gale.

This year Woods was certain he'd earned his third National when it appeared his horse Amble Speedy had edged Jason Titley's Mudahim into second place.

Titley had even wrapped a warm arm around Woods to congratulate him before Moore ordered his jockey not to go into the enclosure until the result of the photo finish had been announced. The trainer's wily instincts had been sharper even than the television cameras and Titley was declared the winner by a short head.

Klairon Davis brought Woods the Arkle Trophy in 1995 and the Queen Mother Champion Chase the following year at Cheltenham. The Galway Plate had already fallen into his lap in 1994, again on Feathered Gale, and in 1995 he picked up the Thyestes Handicap Chase in Gowran Park on another of Moore's horses Wylde Hide. Lots of luck?

"The year before last I'd 78 winners, which was a fantastic year. With Arthur we'd a 25 per cent rate of winners. That's an incredible rate," he says. Luck has rarely come into the equation.

He can't remember the name of the last horse he rode in the spring. It was probably the weekend before the crash in a flat meeting but the race is lost to him. His view is that it will not be significant because his arm will mend and he will again occupy his seat in the Irish racing hierarchy. His difficulty is in keeping his vision long. Woods's tendency is to lash out rather than roll with the waves and from that stance a year seems like an endless string of opportunities passing him by. But his thin top soil of patience is becoming deeper. It has had to.

He has been in the gym for the last three months doing exercises which are now deemed possibly useless if the transfer of nerves is to take place. It's difficult but there is no option other than acceptance. He recalls his own attitude to Adrian Maguire, who missed a year of racing with a badly injured arm.

"I used read it in the Racing Post and flick past. I used to think . . . well, that's a long time . . . a year and then forget it. Then you find yourself in his boat. It's a lot longer. Jesus, it feels like ages."

Woods still goes racing. Arthur Moore brought him to Ascot two weeks ago and he watched Jeffell run badly and pull up. He went to Fairyhouse to see the majestic Klairon Davis.

"It's the likes of that you miss. Every horse won't be a winner. Most of them will have a story. I try to go everywhere Klairon Davis runs."

It is impossible to forget animals like Klairon Davis, the best horse Woods has ever ridden. A class horse. His courage. His speed. His honesty. Woods had ridden many good horses but it's only when a race turns into a battle that a jockey can feel the engine of a Cheltenham winner beneath him.

"He never, ever failed in a battle. He'll always pull his ears back and stick his head out. When a horse answers everything you ask, that's what you want. Not many horses do that for you."

Recently Woods found himself at home reading the paper mumbling `Jesus I wish I was in Tipperary'. He sometimes walks past his riding gear hanging up at home and he watches other jockeys, notably Conor O'Dwyer, ride horses he would have been on board into the winners' enclosure. The horses have to race. Someone has to ride them. Life goes on. That's his view. There is no self pity, merely frustration and defiance.

"I went out in a hurry. I presume I'll have to come back slowly and fight my corner. I think I can be better than before. I'll be out to prove a point . . . yeh, I'd be very keen to do that."

It will be next season before that opportunity arises. At 30 he feels the time move faster than when he was 21. He has always said to himself that he would bring it to an end at 35. But that would be his decision, not the twist of a car accident. And that time is five years away. Like with the foal at Goffs, Francis Woods has been bloodied. But he is not out.