Dr. Adrian McGoldrick joined Ger Gilroy and Johnny Ward for Friday Night Racing to look back at the work he has done to improve conditions for jockeys over the years.
He was appointed the Chief Medical Officer for the Irish Horse Racing Regulatory Board in January, 2008 and over the years, he as earned the trust of the jockeys which has allowed him to study various aspects of the sport intimately.
"I was very friendly with Johnny Murtagh and knew the struggles Johnny was going through so he's the person I can probably thank or blame for having me where I am now!," he told Ger.
"But I certainly got to know lots of the lads and I was working at The Curragh which was fairly straight forward - it's a flat track. I live literally a mile from The Curragh and then about 13/14 years ago I just got more and more concerned when I looked at the lads with their dehydration - what they were doing to make weight and I asked them would they let me do a small study on them.
"So eleven of the senior jockey's allowed me to take blood before and after racing and it proved what I always knew - these guys were seriously dehydrated during racing. Now I went and looked at their literature and there were only four papers on on jockeys in the literature at the time and so coincidentally at that time the enquiry into safety in racing in 2004 and I made a presentation on making weight and I made a recommendation that we should do further research so I'd like to thank HRI (Horse Racing Ireland) in particular for funding it and obviously Dennis Egan, my Chief Executive at the Turf Club - they totally came on board and said 'Look, we do need to do more research'.
"So I linked up with Giles Warrington - Giles was based in the university of Limerick, a senior sports physiologist involved with the Olympic teams and so, from there, we started the Turf Club Research Team which has expanded quite dramatically.
"Now, we've Sarah Jane Cullen who came through as one of our Ph.D students - she's now a lecturer in Waterford overseeing two of the three projects which we've up and running currently so over the last 11 years we've done quite a lot of research, looking at different areas of racing, be it bone health, looking at hydration, looking at energy used during racing and trying to find out more about racing.
"We do liaise with our colleagues internationally obviously to make sure we're not duplicating what we're doing. We've Gillian O'Loughlin as our senior dietitian for the last 10 years looking at Dietetics and more recently through the Jockey Pathway, we've Wayne Middleton who is a Strength and Conditioning Coach working with our jockeys out of race.
"Ciara Losty, a Sports Pyschologist, which is a very important element, who got involved in the last two years and from a physiotherapy point of view - we've had John Butler for the last 10 years working with our Jockey's on-track, he's on two tracks every two weeks so we're rolling out the basic service they need and any elite athlete should have.
Listen to the full discussion here:
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