Article from the BBC… http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/horse-racing/26871933
Jump jockeys really are a special breed.
A couple of excerpts…
:eek:
Thornton once broke his collarbone five times in one season. His solution? Getting his surgeon to saw off a third of the bone and poke the loose end into a hole drilled into the shoulder muscle, so that rather than snapping on impact it would merely bury itself in his flesh. He describes it as the best thing he had ever done.
“I remember the first time I broke my collarbone in my teens,” he says. "I stood up and my shoulder just collapsed. I was nearly physically sick.
"You don’t know what shock is, you don’t know what pain is, you don’t know how long you’re going to be out for. There’s panic. How long will this take? Other people are going to be riding my horses. Oh my god. Do I still have a living?
“But you get used to it. When you’re older, it’s more: 'Here we go again, three weeks out, I’ll put on seven pounds, I’ll have to get that weight off… '”
Then there are the wives and girlfriends, the parents and best friends, watching on from the grandstand as the person they love and fear for lies motionless on a stretcher, or waiting impotently at home as a text comes in from a number they do not recognise.
“To me it’s about his back, because you have two of everything else,” says AP’s wife Chanelle.
"If he falls, and he moves his legs or his arms, then that’s great - it’s not his back, or his neck. He’s not paralysed.
“I have seen him leave the house in the morning with a broken ankle, and a broken thumb. He has ridden with a broken collarbone. That would be unknown to most people, yet he’s able to manage the pain.”
