Recovering jockey for operation next week

Ratoath jockey Peter Toole, who was injured in a serious fall at the Aintree Grand National meeting last April, is to undergo an operation in Cardiff next week in an attempt to mend his injured right shoulder. He has been recovering from his injuries at Oaksey House, the jockeys' rehabilitation centre in Lambourn, England, and was home with his family at Moortown for the Christmas period. At Liverpool on Grand National day, the John Smith's Maghull Novice Chase was only 12 seconds old as he followed Ruby Walsh and Ghizao to the first fence on 100/1 shot, Classic Fly. Ghizao skipped across it with a neat action, his two front legs perfectly parallel as he crossed the brush, but Classic Fly hardly left the ground at all. Toole came down head first and bounced on the hard ground while Classic Fly tumbled through the air in his wake. Although the horse got up and carried on, the jockey was left face down and motionless. The horrific fall left Peter Toole in a coma for 13 days at Liverpool's Fazakerley Hospital, and he has a 25-day black hole in his memory. His current stay in Oaksey House is thanks to the Injured Jockeys' Fund, and comes after a spell in the National Rehabilitation Centre in Dún Laoghaire. A state-of-the-art complex in Lambourn, it's where he will complete his recovery over the coming year, including receiving speech therapy. "I'm going for an operation on 16th January in Cardiff," he told the Irish Times last week. "I've been waiting on it for ages. They've done scans and x-rays and there's a bone sticking out, sort of floating around the joint. A bit must have chipped off when they put the shoulder back in after it was dislocated." He went on: "The power in my arm wouldn't be that much. I can do anything I like with it but once I take it out to the side, I lose movement in it. "I don't have any pain in it in general but when I bring it out to the side, it can only go so far and then it hurts. They could have operated on it when I was coming round but they didn't know there was anything wrong with it." Son of James and Fidelma Toole, his mother breeds point-to-pointers and provided Peter with his first ever winner up in Tyrella, Co Down, back in 2005. He went to work for Tom Taaffe in 2007 and rode a winner in his first ever hurdle race on Emotional Moment, fighting out a breathless finish in Navan a fortnight before Christmas that year by half a length. The following August, he joined Charlie Mann's stable in England, and in just a couple of seasons, he clocked up rides for over 100 trainers. Out of 674 rides, he managed to pilot 68 of them home in front and clocked up prizemoney in the region of €300,000 for various owners. Classic Fly was trained by Arthur Whiting, a small yard handler from Gloucestershire. In 34 races before Toole sat up on him, he'd only ever won once, a full 18 months before Aintree.