Everything else has been overshadowed.

It's a horrible tragedy and it's beyond words what his family must be feeling at the moment. I know his father Jimmy to say hello to . . . he used to be a jockey, working for Mick O'Toole. Dary had four sisters and one brother and he was from Athgarvan, just out the road from me, near Newbridge. Although I didn't know him personally, he was a popular young fella by all accounts.

It's the saddest thing imaginable. He was only a kid, 20 years old, trying his heart out to get a life for himself as a jockey.

Every lad that holds a licence is one of us. We all take the same risks, we all know what we're getting into. When something like this happens, it knocks the stuffing out of every one of us. Thank God it doesn't happen all that often.

Dary was a seven-pound claimer trying to get going in the world of racing.

He was working his socks off, riding out for three or four different yards. Just trying to get going, trying to get a start.

He was riding out as many horses as he could, just to get the experience, just to get his name known and respected and to get his foot on the ladder.

That's the way every one of us started. It's phenomenally hard work but there isn't a more exciting time in a young jockey's life. You don't know what the future holds but you know that you want to keep working towards it. I heard that the week before last, Dary rode out 24 horses in one day.

That's a sign of a young lad who wants nothing more out of life than to be a jockey. You're putting in every ounce of effort to become the next Dunwoody or the next Tony McCoy.

Racing is like a drug. There's a young jockey we know, Shaun McManus, who's going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life after a fall at a point-topoint in Tipperary last May. But I know that if there was an operation that could fix him, he'd go back point-topointing in the morning.

We all feel that way. I went down to the funeral on Wednesday morning and all it took was one look at him and I was thinking that it could just as easily be me lying there in that box. We're faced with this reality every once in a while but this is the first time since that awful summer three years ago when Kieran Kelly and Sean Cleary died that we've lost someone.

In the early part of the week, it was all that most of us were talking about.

In the cars on the way home from Sligo on Sunday night, everybody's phones were going. It was horrible. The last week of the season, everyone looking forward to Punchestown and then this happens. The racing community is so small and so close that a death like this affects everyone. There were a lot of quiet cars on the road back from Sligo.

It's just so, so sad.

It's been there in the back of everyone's mind all week. Jockeys have to be selfish when they're competing so once you go on the track, all other thoughts leave you. But in quiet moments, when you get a bit of time to yourself, it comes back to you.

I was a bit angry at myself a couple of times during the week for picking the wrong horse when I had the choice of two and the one I didn't pick won. But both times, it only took a couple of seconds before Dary Cullen sprang to mind and I snapped out of it. Nothing's so bad in racing that can't be solved by riding in the next race. Dary's death reminded me to be thankful that I have a next race.

To be honest, what happened on the track after that was all irrelevant in comparison. It couldn't have gone much better for me overall and it was great to wrap up the jockeys' championship like that. There were a few nice horses and Iktitaf was a great spare to pick up. Asian Maze was especially brilliant . . . I definitely think she'll be worth aiming at the Champion Hurdle next year.

For all that, though, it was hard to get too carried away.