The mother of a five-year-old girl who fell and hit her head on the road after her pony was spooked by a group of cyclists said it “beggars belief” that anyone would organize such an event on that road. Vanessa Roxburgh’s daughter Bethany was hacking out on lead rein with Gemma Park, a friend who works at the livery yard Vanessa owns when cyclists taking part in a sportive (an organized non-competitive event) came past. Gemma said they were very close to home, a yard in the Newent area of Gloucestershire when the first bikes appeared.
“They were slow, and one of the cyclists said ‘There’s a few more of us behind’, but I didn’t expect the sheer volume of them,” she said. “The next cyclist for some reason passed on the wrong side of the pony, and quite close, which spooked him a bit, and then there was a big group of them. “It all just happened so fast. There were maybe six to 10 of them, coming downhill, making that high-pitched whirring sound of bikes en masse, and the pony went: ‘That’s enough, I’m out of here.’ ”
The pony, a Welsh section A called Crunchy, galloped off but not towards home as Gemma had expected. “He got faster and faster and more and more panicked,” Gemma said. “I was thinking ‘For God’s sake, don’t let go’, but in the end, it was impossible to hold on to him. “The pony didn’t turn for home, he carried on down quite a steep hill but Beth had fallen off by then.“She was crying, with a fat lip and a bleeding nose, ” Gemma said eventually one cyclist did stop to pick Bethany up, while another caught the pony and brought him back.
“But while it was going on – she was on the floor and the pony was panicking and spinning – the others ignored us and just kept on going past, quite quickly,” she said. “The road’s so bendy and narrow; it wasn’t suitable for an event like that. What if they’d met a car at that speed? It doesn’t bear thinking about. “I still can’t quite believe it happened and it was so avoidable – if we’d known the event as on, we wouldn’t have gone out. Apart from a bloody nose and a fat lip, and Beth needs a new hat, everyone’s fine but it could have been so much worse.
