It takes only one fall from a horse or pony to learn quickly that riding comes with risk. A new study from the United States seeks to determine how high risk our sport is.
The research paper was published in BMJ Journals with the auspicious title: Hearing hoofbeats? Think head and neck trauma: a 10-year NTDB analysis of equestrian-related trauma in the USA. The upshot was that riding horses was more dangerous than playing football, riding motorcycles or downhill skiing. The conclusion was based on frequency of hospital admissions following a sports accident, with equestrians topping the list.
Based on hospital admissions, riding mishaps outrank skiing accidents. (Oleksandr Pyrohov/Pixabay)
According to the study, “the most frequent type of injury was in the thorax, but head and neck injuries produced the highest mortality.”