A British National Hunt jockey has suffered catastrophic injuries in a horror fall that has destroyed his hopes of being the season’s champion rider.
Felix De Giles is a name well-known to a British audience, having started his career at the famed Seven Barrows yard in Lambourn of Nicky Henderson, for whom he rode a winner at the Cheltenham Festival in 2009.
He moved to France in 2015 and has built up an outstanding career, the peak arriving in 2023 when he won the French Championship.
De Giles, 36, was on course to achieving that feat again, having had 71 successes in this campaign, earning connections more than €2.7million in prize money.
But De Giles is facing a huge spell on the sidelines following a fall at Auteuil last Sunday in which he broke both his legs and an arm, fractured his femur and dislocated his hip when tumbling off his horse, Sunny Swing, in a hurdle race; Auteuil is to French jump racing what Cheltenham is to the UK.
Falls in hurdle races are often seen as the most dangerous, as horses tend to be running a stride quicker than they would be when jumping bigger fences. There were 17 other runners alongside Sunny Swing in this particular contest when the calamity unfolded.
Sunny Swing appeared to have plenty of room going into the fourth obstacle but the gelding suddenly took an extra stride and flipped over, throwing De Giles to the floor – and straight into the path of two rivals, one of whom was brought down and the other galloped over him.
It was a sickening episode, the kind of which you makes you wince when you see it unfold, and De Giles had the trauma of immediately understanding what had gone on as he wasn’t knocked out by the impact of the fall. He was take immediately to Georges Pompidou Hospital in Paris.
‘The arm doesn’t feel too bad but the legs are pretty swollen, he said. ‘Unfortunately I was conscious throughout. I saw my right leg was snapped but I have no idea how I managed to break both. They did all the repairs in one operation, the arm, both legs and put the hip back.
‘I hope that’s it as far as operations go.’
He faces a lengthy rehabilitation period and as he explained to The Daily Telegraph: ‘I have to stay lying down for three weeks. Because of the hip I can’t even sit up in a wheelchair and whether I do that here or in a hospital nearer home I’m not sure yet. It hasn’t been decided.
‘I’d have probably caught the leader (Lucas Zuliani) in the jockeys’ title (which ends on January 31) because I tend to do well at Cagnes and Pau in the winter but that’s all in the past now.’
This is another sobering reminder of the omnipresent danger that jockeys, whether on the flat or over jumps, face on a daily basis, where no race can ever be staged without an ambulance following the runners in hot pursuit.
Last month, Jim Crowley and Trevor Whelan suffered terrible damage when they were flung from their horses in a race at York over six furlongs; Crowley, one of the most experienced men in the weighing room, admitted he was fortunate to have only suffered broken bones.
Incidents of riders being killed in action, mercifully, are few and far between but this year a black cloud descended over racing when Michael O’Sullivan, a young jockey of enormous talent, lost his life following a fall at Thurles racecourse in Ireland.
