New Research into Racing Injuries in Jump Racehorses

Researchers from the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) are calling to raise awareness and encourage you to participate in new and ongoing research that aims to prevent serious injury in racing.

Serious non-fatal musculoskeletal injuries, such as tendon or ligament injuries and fractures, often carry a poor prognosis for returning to racing, require lengthy periods of rehabilitation and have a significant risk of recurrence. Whilst we have a good understanding of how race conditions influence the risk of race-related injury, little is known about how training practices and veterinary history contribute to racing injury risk.

We will be inviting jump and dual-purpose trainers to complete a questionnaire about specific horses in their care. These horses have been chosen either because they sustained a serious injury on the racecourse or because they have been selected as a non-injured ‘control’ for an injured horse, to enable a comparative analysis. The questionnaire will help us learn more about your training facilities, as well as the individual’s training regimen and their veterinary history.

The information gathered from the questionnaires will be combined with data routinely collected by the British Horseracing Authority, including racing history, to give a more complete picture of the horse on and off the racecourse. Analysis of your data may help us to identify novel factors that minimise injury risk and allow us to more reliably predict horses at a heightened risk of race-related injury.

This project will contribute towards the racing industry’s priority to reduce and minimise avoidable injury. Injury prevention may also help extend a horse’s racing career and mitigate the financial losses associated with veterinary costs, reduced race participation and premature retirement.

Please be assured that all data will be handled in the strictest confidence and used solely for the purposes of this project. All project results will be anonymised, and no horse, trainer or training yard will be identifiable in any communications, presentations or publications arising from this work. The project has received ethical approval from the Social Sciences Research Ethical Review Board (SSRERB) at the RVC (URN: SR2024-02611003). More details about this project can be found here: https://www.rvc.ac.uk/research/projects/predicting-injury-risk-and-post-injury-outcomes-in-jump-racehorses-in-great-britain. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact Sophia McDonald via email smcdonald24@rvc.ac.uk or phone 01707669232.