KIEREN Fallon’s decision to retire last year amidst the revelation that he’d been battling severe depression made for a big story at the time. But it’s far from the final chapter for the six-time British champion jockey, and news that he is enjoying the opportunity to ride work in Dubai, while also getting treatment for his condition, is welcome.

Fallon’s career in the saddle was marked by extreme peaks and troughs, and he will always be a divisive figure in bar-room discussion, but as much as his current struggle is a very personal one, it is also strongly indicative of that battle which so many jockeys face, and which so few of us outside that arena can understand.

Fallon, in a recent interview with the Racing Post said: “When you stop riding you think your whole world ends. Thinking of all the boys, I’m not very far behind Pat Eddery, Walter Swinburn, Mark Birch, Lindsay Charnock, people I was riding with, how quick they can go. You have to try to look after yourself.”

Those are telling words. He admitted that he should have retired some time before he did, but carried on because he didn’t know how he would cope with a life out of the saddle. He’s not the first to have that fear, and great jockeys of the past have rarely enjoyed the benefit of contented retirement.

AN UNFORGIVING SPORT

From John Wells to Walter Swinburn, the history books are full of brilliant jockeys who never got to live their three score years and 10, and that has often been the direct or indirect result of the torturous regime which leading riders have had to endure in what is a physically and mentally unforgiving sport.

Like Swinburn, John Wells had achieved great success as a teenager, and was crowned champion jockey in Britain twice by the time he was 20, but constant wasting made him weak, and he died of consumption before he reached 40.

Tom French, like Wells the winner of the Derby in consecutive seasons, was shy of his 30th birthday when succumbing to the same disease as a result of his efforts to control his weight, and his role as stable jockey to the pre-eminent Mat Dawson was taken by the most brilliant and most tragic jockey of all, Fred Archer.

If tuberculosis was Scylla for the Victorian jockey, Charybdis came in the form of the gin bottle, and such luminaries as Bill Scott, George Fordham and Jem Snowden drank themselves to an early grave.

Such travails are not confined to the 19th century, however, and while it’s tempting to view our racing heroes without feet of clay, the path of champions is often against the collar, and the physical and psychological challenge remains exacting.

POWER OF ADDICTION

Pat Eddery was simply sublime in his outstanding career as a jockey, but his inability to overcome an addiction to drink makes his story one tinged with deep sadness.

Eddery was second in the 1985 Derby to Steve Cauthen and Slip Anchor – still regarded by many as the most perfect ride they have seen at Epsom, but despite his clean-cut image, even Cauthen was affected by the temptation of drink (champagne has very few calories, of course), and promptly checked himself into rehab at the end of the season.

Kieren Fallon is another who has sought professional help for an alcohol addiction, and while it’s dangerous to conflate alcoholism with depression, the pair tend to live cheek by jowl in the racing fraternity. It’s a similar story with recreational drugs, of course, and a decade ago Fallon, fresh from serving a drugs ban, touched on how one could be symptomatic of the other when he said in an interview with Clare Balding: “When things aren’t going well…you get to the stage you don’t really care any more.”

This predisposition to rely on alcohol and/or drugs as a crutch has been highlighted in starker terms across the Atlantic, where Garrett Gomez, one of the most talented jockeys to grace North America in decades, was found dead of a drug overdose last month at the age of 44.

Several years prior to that, Michael Baze, rider of more than 900 winners, was found dead in his car from a suspected overdose at only 24, and in 2000 Chris Antley, who had won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes on Charismatic the year before, died as a result of an accidental drug overdose initially misdiagnosed as homicide. All three were at or near the top of their profession but failed to cope with the pressures presented by success.

The sport would be much richer if they and their like were able to cope with the circumstances which tragically got the better of them, so when you read about the former jockey enjoying the Dubai sunshine as he comes to terms with the end of his competitive career, try to be happy for him - he deserves it.