Blackmore brilliance buries old prejudices

It took 60 years of the Cheltenham Gold Cup for a woman even to make the start line, but only another 37 for one to finish as leading jockey of the Festival. Rachael Blackmore, loath though she would be to acknowledge it, has not so much moved the needle as rewritten the manual. Her six winners at Prestbury Park, one shy of Ruby Walsh’s record, constitute both a rebuke to the old fallacies that female jockeys are limited by their physiology and a mighty kick against the prejudices they have traditionally had to confront.

Blackmore, at 31, has only ever wanted to be judged on her own terms. To ask her about her achievements as a woman is to receive almost a disdainful shrug. Why, when she has crushed male opponents for the best part of a week, should she feel the slightest inferiority complex?

It said much about her impact at this Festival that her second place in the Gold Cup on A Plus Tard, just shaded by Minella Indo as the two Henry de Bromhead horses duelled up the hill, felt almost anticlimactic. Yet it was still the finest result by a female rider in the race’s history.

In the space of a week, it feels as if racing has changed irrevocably.

Blackmore, the dairy farmer’s daughter from Tipperary with a degree in equine science, has long been the prime candidate to dismantle her sport’s gender gap, but few believed the moment would arrive so swiftly or dramatically. Even before the Festival began, she had amassed 61 winners for the season in Ireland, but none of them under so glaring a spotlight.

So stacked has the system tended to be against women on such a stage, their Cheltenham breakthroughs are magnified for their rarity. When Bryony Frost became, in 2019, the first female to win a Grade One race at the Festival, it was a national sensation. Blackmore, with her six wins, including a Champion Hurdle, has not so much revised expectations for her sex as redrawn them.

You will never hear this selfeffacing soul talk herself up as a trailblazer. Invariably, any credit is shifted to the horse. Such modesty surely does her talents a disservice. For one striking lesson of this Festival is the difference she can make through her own tactical brilliance. All week, she has been engineering wins from the front, the back and the middle of the pack.

While she could not quite draw one last surge from A Plus Tard, her win in the Triumph Hurdle on Quilixios was another impeccable case of timing her run to perfection.

What Blackmore has done for the cause of women in racing cannot be exaggerated. In 1984, Linda Sheedy, the first female to ride in the Gold Cup, hardly found the achievement conferred much respect. She was sent out on Foxbury, a 500-1 shot, a billing in keeping with her fate at the Grand National three years earlier, when one bookmaker had offered odds of 8-1 against her and mount Deiopea even being able to complete the first three fences.

A stereotype persisted that women were not cut out for the National Hunt game. All too often, trainers passed up the invitation to give them a chance. The shortsightedness of such a move has been thrown into the sharpest relief by Blackmore, whose other defining attribute is her resilience. Having fallen off Embittered at full pelt on the second day, she won the very next race. After taking a further tumble on Plan of Attack, she made immediate amends with Quixilios.

Blackmore (below) is everything that could be asked for in a jockey. She is not one to dwell on the wider significance of her breakthrough – in any case, she is booked for four rides at Thurles today – but perhaps we can do that for her.

For after a year in which the pandemic has reduced women’s platforms for sporting excellence to a disproportionate degree, Blackmore has offered a reminder of what is possible.

She has helped turn a world once known for rank chauvinism into possibly the most egalitarian sport of all.

She is not the strident type, but hers is truly a feat worth shouting about.