Frost hoping to complete her ‘fairy tale’
Young jockey was ‘feral’ at school but finds peace on Black Corton, her brilliant Festival ride
Bryony Frost knows how fervently her mother, Nikki, an accomplished ballerina, wanted her to embrace the world of pink tutus and pique turns. As the longed-for daughter after two boys, she was expected to bring some delicate femininity to a household awash with testosterone. But little Bryony, so tomboyish she made Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird seem a model of decorum, had other ideas. “Mum would have to wrestle me into a dress,” she laughs. “My girly side was non-existent. I would far rather ride off through the mud on my ponies, letting my imagination run wild.
I’d come back looking like the bogmonster from Dartmoor.”
At 22, she is still revelling in her defiance of expectations.
A year ago,
Frost was a little-known amateur, obsessed with the racing life, but waiting for the break that would enable her to make her passion her profession. It arrived, improbably enough, in the shape of Black Corton, the “absolute dude” of a horse on which she has since won seven races out of eight. This week, the pair of them arrive at the Cheltenham Festival, not just with a realistic chance in Wednesday’s RSA Chase, but with a prediction by trainer Paul Nicholls – normally a man of scrupulous restraint in assessing jockeys – that Frost could yet be “as good as any girl who has ever ridden”.
She is, by any gauge, an irrepressible force of nature. On a dank, grimy afternoon at Kempton Park, her guileless charm gleams like a flashlight amid the late winter’s gloom. To ask Frost anything, whether about surfing in her native Devon or strumming melodies on her acoustic guitar, is to be disarmed by a torrent of enthusiasm. But she is never more soulful or compelling than when her mind is left to dwell upon horses.
“I open my eyes and horses are in my world,” she says, wistfully. “That beautiful four-legged creature up there, that’s who I aspire to be. It has been what I have looked at from when I was a little girl until now, and I wouldn’t change it for anything. I’d be lost if you took them out of my world, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. I’m running with them – they’re my partners. And if I don’t have my partners, I don’t know who I am.”
It is this exquisite symbiosis that she has achieved, at so tender a stage of her career, with Black Corton. Hopes were slight when Nicholls put them together at Worcester last July, for Frost’s first race as a conditional jockey, but the combination has proved so powerful that last Boxing Day she became only the second woman after Lizzie Kelly to win a Grade One jumps race in Britain.
She understands that she was born to do this: her father, Jimmy, won the Grand National on Little Polveir in 1989, and what her childhood lacked in material wealth it amply made up for in the freedom of riding out across Dartmoor’s stark, sodden expanses.
So smitten was she by the mere sight of ponies, which she was racing by the age of nine, that school seldom captured her interest.
“It wasn’t ideal,” she sighs. “All I would ever think about was being at home with my ponies and making them better. I’d put a little bicycle light on top of my hat and they would learn to follow it, even in the dark, through Hembury Woods.
“That kind of upbringing is just incredible. So, when you’re flung into school and have to sit still for an hour, it’s very difficult for a feral child like me to do.”
With her broad Devon accent and gift for self-effacement, Frost sometimes likes to play up to this country-bumpkin caricature, although nothing could be further from the truth. When her mother told her that she had to concentrate for the last six months of her GCSES – “For God’s sake, just come out with some grades” were her exact words – she studied ferociously, emerging from South Dartmoor Community College with five A*s. She could have qualified for a plethora of different career options, but nothing seduced her as irresistibly as racehorses.
Cheltenham, in particular, held a captivating allure. “When my brother Hadden won there for David Pipe on Buena Vista, I can remember being at home, absolutely screaming at the telly,” she says. “I think I must have shifted a few slates off the top of the roof. When he got home, I got a bed sheet, folded it in half, and drew a picture of Buena Vista on there with a big ‘Welcome home, Hadd’ message, and hung it outside. We ate cottage pie and watched it on replay multiple times, just to make sure he had won.”
Following the same path was not always straightforward. When Frost took a fall in a schooling accident aged 15, she damaged her ureter, the duct by which urine passes from the kidney to the bladder, and spent several weeks in hospital after contracting septicaemia.
Fresh agonies ensued when she tried, two stone lighter, to wean herself off the morphine. What sustained her were the reminders from her father of the hardships that every jump jockey had to endure in pursuit of glory.
“Dad has been through the best and the worst,” she explains. “He knows how difficult it is, that you’ve got to take hits. He told me that my body would get broken, but that my next horse could be a winner. ‘Whatever you do, it’s going to be hard,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to break moulds and perceptions, and it might take you a bit longer. But if you’re good and if you’re determined, you might get there.’ That’s what I’ve lived by.”
It is this attitude that she also applies to the vexed area of gender politics in racing, where she is emerging as the best prospect of becoming, one day, the first female champion jockey. Although she does not identify this as a goal, insisting that the “summit is still too far away”, she scoffs at any idea that a jockey’s ability is determined by physical strength.
“My technique is to keep the horse in a rhythm, to keep the oxygen flowing to his muscles so that he can run faster for longer. Boy or girl, I would do it the same. You’re telling me that a rugby player could hold a horse as well as a jockey? Not a chance. You cannot tell a horse what to do. He has got his own mind.”
This much is true, certainly, of Black Corton. If she fidgets, he grows restless. If she holds his rein even slightly too tightly, he snatches at her. But with some typically dexterous handling, there is, one senses, another wondrous chapter in their relationship just waiting to be written at Cheltenham. “Who would believe what we have done together,” Frost asks, earnest and full of emotion. “When do you ever come across a fairy tale? He’s my fairy tale. I’ll never be able to thank him enough. To him, I owe the world.”
‘I’d put a little bicycle light on top of my hat and my ponies would learn to follow it’