I have a teenager. He’s fairly sweet and not normally given to tough love. Here’s what he had to say about my most recent riding injury:
Me: It’s just unfair. I tucked, I rolled, I got out the way of the horse. I did what I was meant to do.
Teenager: And you broke your shoulder not your back. That’s exactly what’s meant to happen. Now you get over it.
Voila, the effect of being parented by a biomechanist who consults in forensics. My son instinctively understands a fail-safe. From an engineering perspective a fail-safe is a way of preventing a more serious failure. It is a safety net – it doesn’t stop you from falling, but it does prevent the full impact of hitting the floor. It’s inconvenient when your house plunges into darkness because of a trip switch or a fuse that’s blown, but on the plus side
your house did not burn down and you are not on fire. In the horse’s legs the accessory (check) ligaments of the flexor tendons are partly a fail safe. When they break it is a large problem and they take a while to heal but nothing like the carnage that would have occurred if the check ligament had not “taken the strain” literally and figuratively and the main tendon had been allowed to tear.
In the British horse industry in particular, we love a fail safe. We tie our horses up with a breakable link, designed to snap under tension, a practise often frowned upon in the U.S.A. I see the arguments on both sides but I will say this: I once cross-tied a horse with both a leadrope tied solid and a travel bungee. When the horse slipped the travel bungee did exactly what it was meant to do and snapped, the leadrope did not and it flipped the horse over. The physical and psychological damage was pretty dramatic, and even the pure financial cost was a lot more than a replacement bungee. Anecdotal evidence counts for little other than to illustrate that whilst there are few times when you want an unexpectedly loose horse, there are some.
I’ve seen a lot of people complain when their kit broke, and I myself have lamented my damaged hat, ripped rug, snapped headcollar, etc. Working in equine biomechanics as an expert witness though, I’ve seen a lot of what happens when there is no fail safe. Personally, I’ve broken my ankle against a stirrup, so last year when I merely broke my stirrup I was happy enough to pay out to replace it. Similarly when a rug rips or the catch breaks, it’s always frustrating, but I’ve seen the alternative and that’s really not pretty. We use leather headcollars not just because they look the business but because – in the case of no acceptable alternative – they snap. Your stirrups may now be safety stirrups and your stirrup bars have long been designed to release the leathers. It’s worth extending that logic to every part of your horse’s world – your tack, your haynets, your ring-feeders, your fencing – if this fails, does it fail safely? If not, sometimes it can be quick and simple to change that. A fail safe is often cheaper than what it can save you from having to replace.
One of the most successful developments in this area is the safety cup (showjumping) or frangible pin (eventers). Gone are the days when even in showjumping if you came downwards onto a pole, such as a horse hitting the back bar of a spread, the only way that pole was going to shift was if you broke it in two (as often we did). Now cups are designed to release whichever direction you hit them in and I would encourage anyone to ensure that this is the type of cup they use in their competitions and at home. This release means that the cup also “fails” by hitting the ground and needs to be reset along with the pole, but as riders we already endure greater hardships than this. Horses do not need to hit their legs hard to learn to be careful, and jumping should be about the confidence to make mistakes, not a high-risk sport. The rotational fall is our greatest cause of serious injury and could yet be eradicated – the horse should never strike a solid enough object to be thrown into a cartwheel.
If release is not an option, our second defence for injury prevention is to dissipate the incoming force. Crumple zones in cars make modern vehicles rather easy to dent, but by folding up in a predetermined way the car protects the central passenger section from the worst of the blow. Someone else explains that here.
Your helmet is designed along the same lines to protect your head by self-destructing to absorb the blow. It’s got a pretty case around the outside so sometimes you can’t see the damage but still if you bash it you need to replace it. Body protectors on the other hand work by being hard, and saving your body from minor injuries and fractured ribs. They are not a fail safe. They won’t actually protect your spine or prevent internal soft tissue or crush injuries, that’s not what they’re designed to do (e.g. Mills and Gilchrist, 1990; Kelly et al., 2004). The utterly misleading misnomer “back protectors” and their compulsory use in some equestrian disciplines has rather dented any development or acceptance of the spinal protectors seen in other sports. There are plenty of people who tell stories where “without my back protector I would have had a spinal injury” but at the moment the evidence doesn’t support that. Various companies are trying to improve safety and create body protectors that can protect your spine. There is evidence for the need for better safety gear – particularly supports for the cervical spine – and only greater public awareness will help get these products developed.
I jump in a helmet/hat which is lightweight, flexible, vented and peaked. Those elements make it comfortable and beautiful, but give the manufacturers a nightmare job in making it sufficiently safe. My hat adheres to current safety standards, none of which address protection from rotational (brain-tearing) injuries, and those are the cases that would break your heart. These companies are the people we trust with our lives, yet bombard with our mostly fashion-based demands. We undermine them not just with our need for practical wearability, but with social media posts “exposing” hats which break into pieces – as many of the most safe are designed to do, in order to deflect the impact and save our heads. I wish every manufacturer every luck with their task.