A horse racing over jumps in
Britain in 2019 was around seven times more likely to suffer a fatal injury than one on the Flat
At first sight, the figures for fatal injuries to horses while racing in 2019, which were published on the
British Horseracing Authority’s website on Friday, offer sound reasons for hope that the 2018 figure – the highest for six years – was a blip in the overall trend that has seen the fatality rate in British racing drop by a third over the last 20 years. There were 91,937 starts in 2019, and 173 horses suffered fatal injuries, a rate of 0.19%, or 1.9 per 1,000 starts. The previous year saw 201 fatalities from 93,004 starts, an overall rate of 0.22%.
A closer look, however, is more worrisome, not least with the memory of 2018’s Parliamentary debate on racehorse protection, during which one MP asked “when will the target be zero?”, still quite fresh in the mind. This is because the overall figure includes both Flat and jumps racing, and while it remains extremely low, what was already a marked imbalance between Flat racing and the jumps is, if anything, increasing.