Death too high a price to pay for passion

Horses have always been my passion, but it's a passion that has given me two close brushes with death, has robbed me of a close friend and has killed five riders in Britain in the past five months, the most recent being 20-year-old Peter McLean who was killed in Suffolk last Sunday.

I started riding at the age of seven, washing the car and cleaning the family shoes to pay for my riding lessons. I lived, breathed and slept ponies and, even when I graduated on to horses, my attitude didn't change. How was I to know that, a few years down the line, the animals that I adored would so nearly be the death of me?

A simple fall at an indoor show jumping fixture left me with a perfect hoofprint on my abdomen. Used as a trampoline by my equine partner, I ended up on the operating table in Jervis Street hospital with a ruptured spleen and liver.

I owe my life to Professor Collins. When I keeled over in the Xray department from massive internal bleeding, the hospital rang him at home and, if he hadn't made a mercy dash across Dublin and operated on me there and then, I wouldn't have survived to write this piece.

A spell in the intensive care unit was followed by 24-hour nursing in a private room. It all passed in a haze of drugs and pain-killers, drips and drains. But when I was discharged a fortnight later, my first thought was getting back in the saddle as soon as possible.

Fear simply never entered the equation. I'd had a nasty fall, but I'd survived and lightning never strikes twice in the same place. So I carried on as before, working towards my next three-day event, back to full fitness and determined to find my way back into the winners' enclosure.

My trainer Iris Kellett wasn't so confident and, terrified that her fragile student would damage herself again, insisted that my horse was well worked by one of the students before my 6.45 arrival every morning to make sure that he wouldn't execute one of his trademark bucks and send me into orbit.

The partnership flourished and we continued to compete with success, but some years later, I found myself back in hospital, this time confined to my bed in the Navan orthopaedic unit after a stone wall down in Clare had inflicted severe injuries on my back.

Fred Kenny, the saviour of so many jockeys anxious to be back in the plate before they lost all their prime rides, diagnosed a fractured and displaced coccyx and a herniated disc. I'd also broken my nose, my cheekbone and several teeth.

Agony, but hardly life-threatening, except that the huge hole in my riding hat proved that, but for a made-to-measure version which stayed on my head throughout the hunting fall, my skull would have taken the full impact of the fall. That wouldn't have been life-threatening. That would have been dead.

It was a sobering thought and one that I had plenty of time to reflect on as I lay in Navan, awaiting the decision on whether or not I would have to undergo surgery.

I was eventually operated on and, after a suitable period of convalescence, was out hunting again and getting myself fit for the competition circuit. But a couple of years later I was back in hospital, this time for two months, with continuing disc problems. I avoided surgery that time, but after another bout of excruciating pain and a dramatic collapse in Punchestown, I was back under the knife.

Although I was given the go-ahead to ride some months later, there seemed to be no rush this time and, when my friend David Foster was killed in a hideously simple fall just a few miles from his home outside Enfield, Co Meath, on Easter Monday last year, I made up my mind on the spot that I would never ride again.

I told no one but myself, because I had always thought that I could never give up. Horses had been a part of my life for so long that I couldn't imagine being able to exist without my daily injection of adrenalin from an early-morning gallop, a show jumping lesson and a competition every weekend.

But David's death was a salutary reminder that horses are dangerously heavy creatures and that, if they land on you, death is only a hair's breadth away.

Sam Moore died in a fall at Blenheim two years ago. Another friend, Dermot Collins, was killed by falling off a horse in South Africa. The mare was only walking at the time, but Dermot was unlucky in the way he landed, broke his neck and was killed instantly.

The most recent spate of fatalities in Britain has convinced me that I can now state publicly that I won't be riding any more.

My love for the equestrian world has never waned. I will always want to be around horses, to write about them and the people that ride them. But I won't be doing any of the riding myself. Those days are confined to the memory banks and the photograph albums.

Life is unpredictable enough as it is. I didn't want to stack the odds against myself more than I had already done. Because lightning does strike twice in the same place.

British team rider Polly Phillipps had a horrendous fall at Badminton back in May and was badly injured. She was then killed in a very similar fall at the Scottish championships in Thirlestane Castle at the end of last month.

Two weeks later Simon Long was killed at Burghley, 24 hours after Polly Phillipps's funeral. And last Sunday, 20-year-old Peter McLean, who had finished fifth in Necarne Castle only a week before, was killed in a fall in Suffolk.

Maybe it's time we all took a pull and reviewed the sport that we love. Death is too high a price to pay for passion.