Marc Aspland, Chief Sports Photographer of The Times, was at the fourth fence during the Queen Mother Champion Chase yesterday when Wishfull Thinking, the race leader, landed heavily and fell no more than four feet from him, crashing into a crowd of photographers and catapulting his rider, Richard Johnson, into the railings. Here is Aspland’s story.
‘Think of a prize-fighter hitting the canvas with a sickening thud. A National Hunt jockey will be travelling at nearly 30mph on a half-tonne horse wearing racing plates on its hoofs that are razor-sharp and will fall to earth from more than 12 feet. These little jockeys are seriously tough fellas. Standing only feet away from what, on the second circuit, should have been the last fence for the big race of the day, I wanted to capture an angle above the rail as the horses came around from the start. The pounding noise of the horses gets closer and closer, then there is the briefest of silence as the lead horses take off.
At that stage, the rush of colour, debris and the clatter of the camera shutter is all I am aware of for those fractions of a second.
Richard Johnson, on Wishfull Thinking, was the first of many to come flying through my viewfinder. I had no idea that he had fallen just a few feet to my left where the massed ranks of photographers stood or crouched to get their pictures.
Wishfull Thinking had crashed through the rail and rolled over a crouching Jean Charles, a French freelance horse-racing photographer, as Johnson was sent cartwheeling across the turf, screaming in agony. Photographers scattered in all directions as the loose horse tried to regain its composure in among us all.
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Soon the horse had fled and the course medics tended to Richard and Jean. I realised that the Queen Mother race was still going on, so I rushed to capture the duelling runners as they swerved around the closed last fence and on up the hill to the finish line, leaving us all somewhat shell-shocked.