I OWE IT ALL TO NOSEY!
Talented jockey Bryony’s debt to her donkey ‘babysitter’
IF BRYONY FROST climbs into the upper echelons of the jump jockey league she will always owe a debt as well as a host of happy memories to a little donkey called Nosey.
Seven days after the 22-year-old showed the skills first honed on her little, hairy pal by winning the feature race at Wincanton on Paul Nicholls-trained Present Man, Frost was in the spotlight again when successful on his stablemate Black Corton at Cheltenham yesterday.
Frost, whose rides this afternoon include Nicholls-trained leading hope Old Guard in the Greatwood Hurdle, said: ‘Nosey was my babysitter. The rule was if you were off him, you were not allowed back on him. So I stayed on him. He was a legend.
‘I’d even ride him into the kitchen at my grans. She’d say, “You can’t bring Nosey in here” and I’d reply, “I can’t get off him. I have to come in”.
‘Gran loved her chickens and guinea fowl. There’d be sick chicks warming up on the Aga and me on a donkey. It was a mad house.’
Nosey was one of the donkeys kept by her father, Grand Nationalwinning jockey Jimmy Frost, whose jobs included rides for kids on Paignton beach.
It was a business sideline for Jimmy in the days before summer jump racing, when out-of-work riders still needed to earn a crust.
Jimmy also watched as his little girl developed balance and poise in the saddle riding on their Dartmoor doorstep.
The attributes carried her to a national novice point-to-point riding title before she achieved the peak for an amateur jockey with success in the Foxhunter Chase at the Cheltenham Festival in March on Nicholls-trained Pacha Du Polder.
Jimmy, a Grand National winner on Little Polveir in 1989 and now a trainer, recalled: ‘We used to go out riding bareback together.
‘We’d go down steep ravines and through rivers and I’d be on a pony following her. I would say to Bryony, “If you can get me off I will give you a fiver”.
‘She’d go hell for leather along little tracks. One day she went down this steep old slope with fallen trees and brambles and, sure enough, I came off. I paid her a fiver and said, “That’s enough of that game. I am not trying to keep up with you any more”.’
At first he tried to persuade his daughter not to follow him into jumps racing but in that, too, Jimmy, also conceded defeat.
He said: ‘It’s a tough sport. We tried to persuade her to do other equestrian things.
‘I tried to see if she would want to go show jumping because she was good at that. She went to Nick Skelton to see if she would take to it but from the age of 12 or 13 her heart has been set on racing.’
Even at four, Bryony was out hunting with her dad and was soon off his lead rein.
Bryony, whose elder brother Haddon is also a Cheltenham Festivalwinning rider, said: ‘The master of the hunt said if I could keep up, I could go with him.
‘So there I was kicking and flapping my pony. He did used to kick me through the bogs first on my 10oz pony because if he sunk, he knew he could not come through on his big horse.’
With five wins from five rides on Black Corton, she can now lookforward to possibly partnering him in both the Kauto Star Novices’ Chase at Kempton on St Stephen’s Day and the RSA Chase back at the Cheltenham Festival in March.