Midlands-based jump jockey David John Chinn had a childhood ambition to become a jockey and began his racing career at David Nicholson’s yard in 1978.
Most of his rides came from Midlands trainers Ken Bridgwater, Peter Pritchard and John Spearing. Winners were hard to find, his best score being five in the 1983/84 season.
He hit the headlines for the wrong reason when his right ear was ripped off in a horrific fall at Nottingham on January 21, 1986. The accident happened on one of Jimmy Cosgrave’s novice hurdlers, Lady Oryx, who fell at the fifth flight. The horse kicked David’s crash helmet, twisting it around and slicing his ear off. Thankfully the wonders of modern surgery enabled the doctors at Nottingham General Hospital to sew the ear back on, leaving David’s hearing as good as ever.
His career was one of riding bad and often dangerous horses around the ‘gaffs’. In 1991, aged 26, he called time and gave up the unequal struggle. He explained; “In the last five years I’ve had over 500 rides yet only 11 winners and my finances got into a sorry state.
“I’m now managing a chain of curtain blind shops for Terry Greathead who holds a training permit. It would therefore be very easy to be drawn back so I’ve handed in my licence to banish the temptation.”
