Racing Jockeys' safety: A Safety Review Group is to be set up immediately by the Turf Club. The stewards of the governing bodies met at the Turf Club yesterday and discussed the whole issue of safety on racecourses.
At the meeting, attended by Turf Club medical officer Dr Walter Halley, it was decided that a group would be set up to assess every aspect of safety in racing including riding helmets.
A number of Ireland's top Flat jockeys had expressed concern about the effectiveness of the present helmets following the death of their colleague Sean Cleary from head injuries sustained in a fall at Galway on October 26th.
Cleary's death came just three months after jump jockey Kieran Kelly died as a result of head injuries suffered in a fall at Kilbeggan in August.
Denis Egan, of the Turf Club, said: "The stewards today have decided that they are going to set up a Safety Review Group immediately and the Safety Review Group is going to be made up of constituent elements of the industry such as trainers, riders and anybody else like medical advisers, who we feel have an input.
"We reckon the committee would be made up of six or seven people and that committee would review everything to do with safety.
"As part of that review they will invite submissions from anybody who participates in racing who wants to make a submission on any aspect of safety from helmets to programming, to racecourse layouts - the whole works.
"Everything will be examined and we would hope that within two months we would have some kind of report completed. We are pushing on to get it completed because it is absolutely crucial that if there are problems that we address them immediately.
"We are not aware of any specific problems at the moment but we just want to take on board everybody's concerns because safety is crucial."
Dalakhani was crowned Horse Of The Year at the 2003 Cartier Racing Awards in London last night. The Aga Khan's brilliant Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe and French Derby winner, trained by Alain de Royer Dupre, also claimed the Three-Year-Old Colt Award.
Alamshar, also owned by the Aga Khan and the only horse to defeat Dalakhani, was second.
