Ryan Mania: A sure bet for courage unlike QPR’s Adel Taarabt

Just 24 hours after piloting Aurora’s Encore home to victory in his first Grand National, jockey Ryan Mania was in hospital following a fall in a race at Hexham.

The St. John Lee Handicap at the Cumbrian racing outpost carried prize money of £4,500.

The day before, Mania trousered £54,700, his 10% share of the £547,268 prize money that Aurora’s Encore’s owners, a consortium that included a former bellhop at Liverpool’s Adelphi Hotel, collected out of the total prize pot of £975,000 for the world’s greatest steeplechase.

With 54 big ones tucked under his mattress, you could forgive Mania for deciding to have a Sunday lie-in, and getting a big fat cigar on after a traditional jockey’s Sunday lunch of two lettuce leaves (well, they do like to let themselves go on a Sunday) and a piece of apple peel for pudding, washed down by a glass of water (non-gassy).

But instead, Mania was riding at the Hexham meeting, which is equivalent to Andres Iniesta playing in a Barcelona Sunday League Division 3 match the day after parading his skills in the Champions League final.

Such is the precarious nature of a jockey’s existence.

It certainly is not greed that motivated Mania to ride at Hexham. A race with a total price pot of £4,500 isn’t even going to stick enough money in his sky-rocket to fill up his petrol tank.

By and large, jockeys only make money when they ride, so Mania’s agent would be understanding instructions to book the jockey onto as many horses as he can.

Neither Mania nor his agent would assume that he would win the Grand National, and even for the best jockey, £50,000 pay days come round about as often as Halley’s Comet. Most of a jockey’s earnings are made up of the drip-feed of winnings at meetings like Hexham.

Of course, as a winning grand National jockey, Mania’s stock will have risen and he will get to ride a better class of horse, instead of the dried up old nags with three legs and a pogo stick that normally carry Fifty Shades 50p each-way, thus increasing his chances of sharing the prize money.

Having survived – and that’s not a word used too lightly here – two laps of Aintree to win the Grand National, Mania was literally back in the saddle 24 hours later, only for his day to end with a helicopter airlift to Newcastle General hospital after a fall from his mount Stagecoach Jasper.

It wasn’t so much the fall that saw Mania undergo MRI scans to his spine, but being kicked by other horses.

In a snapshot, that again gives you some idea of the danger that jockeys face.

Mania’s fall at Hexham came a month after JT McNamara’s unshipping at Cheltenham, which has left him paralysed from the neck down.

Along with boxing, a jump jockey is the toughest of sporting professions. Statistics show that more jockeys are injured than any other sportsmen, and that’s hardly surprising.

Sitting on top of a half-ton of horseflesh galloping at 30mph is hard enough, but in a field of 25 runners all jostling for position it’s like driving in an auto race by sitting on the roof of the car.

Add in the factor of fences that shorties like Fifty Shades could look over only by standing on a box, and there is another whole element of danger. Imagine sitting on the cross bar of a football goal and falling off and that gives some idea of why so many jockeys sustain injury as they tumble from that sort of height.

Even if they are unscathed from the actual fall they then have to avoid the milling, thundering hooves, shod in hard shiny aluminium shoes, making contact with their head.

Mania would have been fully aware of the risks his profession entails as he set off for Hexham, risks that – not withstanding his unpredicted bumper payday the day before – carry scant financial reward.

The bravery of these guys cannot be understated.

Which brings Fifty Shades to Adel Taarabt.

Compare the risks faced by Mania and other jockeys to those faced by Taraabt as he stood in the Queens Park Rangers’ wall in injury time of their game against Wigan.

As he linked arms with his team mates, Taraabt would have had some appreciation of what was at stake. Keep the ball out of the net and Rangers win the game, and with it the prospect of mounting an heroic charge towards Premier League safety.

It’s not stretching a point to say that Rangers’ season, and if they are relegated with their wage bill – possibly even their future, hinged on that one moment, that one kick from Shaun Maloney.

It required Taarabt to stand firm, shoulder to shoulder with his team-mates.

He ducked.

All that was needed of Taarabt was to allow an air-filled leather case, travelling at 65mph to smack him in the fizzog.

But no, he ducked.

What injury does he risk from a ball travelling fast enough to smudge Katie Price’s make-up if it smacked her in the face?

What price a bloody nose, and a bit of a spinning head for a couple of minutes to claim a priceless three points and keep alive your team’s hopes of avoiding the drop?

Patently too big a price for Taarabt to pay as the damning pictorial evidence showed him turning his back like a little girl being threatened by her big brother with dog poo on the end of a stick.

No doubt, Taraabt took his inspiration from Samir Nasri, who lined up in Manchester City’s wall to face Robin van Persie’s free-kick, and then promptly hid behind a team-mate.

Both Taarabt and Nasri probably each earn in a week what Ryan Mania would struggle to make in four years of normal earnings as a jump jockey.

There is no question of who is worth their money more. Ryan Mania would laugh at the prospect of being hit by a football. Confronted by a steeplechase horse, Adel Taarabt would probably offer it a sugar lump from a well-gloved hand – after all, horses do have rough tongues.

Mania’s agent, Bruce Jeffrey, described the jockey as “frustrated” on Monday night as waited to be discharged from hospital.

“He’s some man, but they’re all the same, these jockeys. I wish I was half as tough,” added Jeffrey, while Mania’s mum Lesley said, of her son who had just undergone MRI scans to check for any hidden dangerous symptoms after being kicked in the head by a galloping horse; “He’s a wee bit sore.”

Courage and bravery are relative elements in sport as in life. It’s unreasonable to expect anybody to climb up on to the back of a racehorse, it takes a special type of courage to do that.

But if Fifty Shades was paying somebody £100,000 a week, or he was a fan paying a fair chunk of his wages over to support a team, it’s not unreasonable to expect a professional footballer to stick his head in the way of a football.

Hoops’ boss Harry Redknapp resisted the temptation to publicly pillory Taarabt, but the murderous looks on the faces of his team-mates directed at Taarabt told the tale.

The looks said ‘next time we want you involved with a wall you’ll be standing in front of one facing five blokes with rifles.’

No doubt, Taarabt will be dodging bullets if QPR are relegated, and his agent will find him another Premier League club mug enough to take on a player with a heart the size of a baked bean.

But if any manager is thinking of asking Taarabt to take part in building a wall, check out his skills with plumb bob and trowel first.

By John May

Follow @maisy68