Racing: Friends reunited after the horror tale

Lucky to be alive

It is beyond gainsaying that riding horses is fraught with danger, but handling them on the ground can be a risky business too. Ask stable lass Anne Blanchard, who is lucky to be alive after a brush with one of the back feet of a sprint handicapper called Artie.

She was laid out more or less cold with her face in assorted bits, and spent a week in an intensive-care unit in hospital, yet four months after the accident she was back at work with her beloved charge, whom she blames not one jot.

Some say that hippophilia and madness are closely allied. Again, ask Anne. "I love horses and was always going to go back to them," she said. "The first thing I did was go and see Artie. He is a super horse and it wasn't his fault."

Probably happily, she has no real recollection of that June day that was so nearly her last. She went to collect Artie from his turnout paddock at trainer Tim Easterby's yard at Malton in North Yorkshire when, from sheer exuberance, the gelding lashed out and caught Blanchard under the jaw. Think of being punched by Mike Tyson with a sharp-edged steel horseshoe on the glove.

"He wasn't aiming at me particularly," said Anne, 42. "It was just one of those things, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don't remember anything of it. I can remember going to the field and seeing him walk towards me, but after that it is blank. All I know is what I was told by people who were there; that Artie heard another horse give a bit of a squeal and that he bounced and spun round and gave a buck and a kick."

Artie's high spirits had smashed Blanchard's jaw and cut the inside of her mouth to shreds. The profuse bleeding was preventing her breathing, and an emergency tracheotomy was performed as soon as she arrived in A&E at York Hospital.

A four-hour operation followed to piece together the broken bones and wire her teeth back in place. "I have still got four plates in my jaw," she said, "but the surgeon did a great job, you can hardly see anything. Luckily the main cut, from my lip to my ear, was on the inside, and they managed to save all of my teeth.

"As I said, I was out of it at the time. But according to those who went with me to intensive care, they thought that I was going to die. Ruth Shepherdson from the yard was the one who was with me in the ambulance and had all the worry and kept everyone in touch, and she is one of my unsung heroes."

Another is the person who was first on to the gruesome scene, Dave O'Meara, a jockey and work-rider attached to the Easterby yard, whose swift action may have helped to save Blanchard's life. "A few of us had been giving our horses a pick of grass by the paddock," he recalled, "and Artie was running about and was beginning to set them off, so Anne said she would go and get him in.

"My horse had started getting very fresh and I decided to put him away, and I was just shutting the stable door when I head this terrible crack, and turned round and there was Anne lying face down on the ground.

"I turned her over and could see she was badly hurt," he continued. "You don't get kicked in the face without being. There was blood everywhere and she was groaning. I rolled her over on her side into the recovery position so she wouldn't choke. I've had no formal first-aid training, but there's so much on TV now, 999 and the like, that you get to know the thing to do. The ambulance crew were there in 10 minutes and then they took over."

Formerly a riding-school instructress, Blanchard has worked in racing for nearly 20 years and at Easterby's base, Great Habton, where she also looks after Turgeonev, Minivet and Silver Coin, for the past six. "In cold weather I feel the plates, but one of the lads has given me a balaclava to wear when I'm riding out," she said. "Artie has acquired a reputation with the public for being a bit lethal, but I know he's not. What happened was a complete one-off."

Blanchard is one of the huge army of behind-the-scenes workers in a labour-intensive industry whose essential contribution has begun to be properly appreciated and rewarded only relatively recently, although there is still room for improvement.

As a recognition for her courage and dedication, she has picked up the accolade of 2003 Stable Employee of the Year.