Racing has to heal its own wounds after Aintree fatalities Winning the Gold Cup empties even the greatest steeplechasers, and Synchronised was not one of those, despite his rousing victory at this year's Festival. After Golden Miller, few trainers asked their Cheltenham victors to turn out 4½ weeks later to face a 4½-mile slog and Becher's Brook. Synchronised's hind-leg fracture when riderless at the 11th fence may not be traceable to his exertions at Cheltenham but we can now say for sure that to try to win both races is generally a bad idea. To extend our circle of care, Tony McCoy, who came off Synchronised at Becher's, was too cut up at the weekend to talk and spoke instead through his wife, Chanelle, who said: "He's devastated and it's all too raw and upsetting at the moment." Meanwhile, Peter Nelson, who owned Saturday's other fatality, According To Pete, doubted whether he would send another horse over those soft-topped walls: "At this moment, I'd say no. But I'm still feeling it, so in time, who knows? At the same Cheltenham Festival where McCoy produced one of his greatest acts of compulsion from the saddle five horses were killed over the first two days. The outrage subsided faster than it will at Aintree, where the annual melee over the Melling Road is a national family viewing ritual in which the speed of jumping has increased in proportion to the softening of the fences. So a programme of humane modifications may have led jump racing to the point where it has compounded its own PR problem and left itself with nowhere to go, some might say, except abolition. This is the time to mobilise resistance. Unless we convince ourselves that National Hunt folk are callous, or sadists, we can discount dishonourable motives, especially at the highest level. Small-stakes provincial racing is more likely to produce recklessness. The Hale family's agonising and McCoy's grief alone rule out the possibility of heartlessness. Nor would any visitor to Synchronised's old dwelling find anything other than a world of regal luxury for horses. Public taste may have shifted away from equine death but the opportunity still exists to make the National safer, starting with the removal of drop fences, such as Becher's Brook, which plunge horses into a confusing world of falling floors on the landing side. Any regular visitor to racing yards will know that the sport's approach to thoroughbred welfare surpasses any expectations the uninitiated may have. With a few exceptions they are places where the horse is venerated, treated as a beast of burden - not a pet - and sent out to race in the fervent hope that it will come back safe. Racing's PR seldom emphasises these truths. Instead it seeks to second-guess the industry's critics and can slip too easily into dishonest pandering to ignorance. Jump racing has edged down the path taken by Formula One after Ayrton Senna's death, but racing experts are the right people to judge which reforms are needed, for the simple reason that they are the ones who stand to gain, or lose, when the horses are counted out, and then counted back in again. They are the ones who care most.