Pioneers who paved way for Blackmore
T‘When Princess Anne came to ride they put in a carpet and catering, but when we went back the next time both were gone’
he achievement of Rachael Blackmore in riding six winners at the Cheltenham Festival and being crowned leading jockey was one of the best things to have happened to racing in a long while.
I just wish for her sake there had been a crowd there – she (and trainer Henry de Bromhead) would have been carried shoulder high across the paddock and, by Friday, up the high street. As a jockey she seems to have everything but, above all, a tactical awareness and versatility possessed by few others.
When she won the Champion Hurdle on Honeysuckle, I made the point that we should no longer distinguish between male and female jockeys – as she herself wishes – and I stick by that. But I am still wondering whether Blackmore is just very good or the distillation of four decades of females trying to break through? The answer is probably a bit of both.
Forget females as professional jockeys for a moment, it should be remembered that, until the end of the Second World War, all stable staff were men and it was not until the 105th running of the Grand National, in 1951, that the winner of that race was led up by a girl for the first time. So, in the time it takes to grow a reasonably sized oak tree from an acorn, the sport has gone from all-male to where we are now; a majority of stable staff are female, and female jockeys are, finally, just jockeys.
When I was riding, from the start of the Eighties, it was at roughly the same time as the early pioneers; Lorna Vincent, Diane Clay, Tarnya Sherwood, Susan Kersey, Ryan Moore’s aunt Candy Morris, Penny Ffitch-heyes and my younger sister Gee, who had had a double at the Cheltenham Festival in 1987 before I had virtually had a ride at it (annoyingly – younger sisters are not meant to do that).
But those early pioneers crashed a few planes trying to prove themselves on bad horses. Jayne Thompson died six days after a first-fence fall at Catterick in November 1986 without ever coming round.
Jessica Charles-jones was paralysed from the waist down, aged 23, at Southwell in 1988, and Sharron Murgatroyd was paralysed from the chest down when her mount fell at the last hurdle at Bangor, trying to get the horse round so that she might keep the ride on it next time, in 1991. Those two spent the rest of their truncated lives in wheelchairs. Jessica died in 2010 and Sharron in 2014 – both before their time.
From a very close-knit, small pool of female riders, that was a high strike rate of catastrophic injuries and, I guess, when they come to write the definitive history of female jump jockeys it will say that, as a breed, they took 10 years to recover and it was not until Nina
Carberry and Katie Walsh started coming over in the 2000s and winning at Cheltenham that they started to really get going again.
“I’m embarrassed to be described as a pioneer for Rachael Blackmore,” says my sister, Gee Bradburne, who hides the videos of her racing from her children because, she reckons, she looks so awful. “She’s in a different league. We just held on to the mane and kicked like hell. She’s reaching the sky, I was ambitious but one of my ambitions in those days was to get a working shower in the girls’ changing rooms at every racecourse across the country.
“I remember, at Worcester, our changing room was a corridor, with no windows, beside the owners’ and trainers’ bar. When Princess Anne came to ride they put in a carpet and catering, but it was slightly disappointing when we went back the next time that both were gone. But, in a way, you can’t blame the racecourses – there were never more than two or three of us and there wasn’t the demand.
“But I always thought if there was a girl who was good enough, being a woman wouldn’t stop them – even in those days. It was always injuries or mistakes that stopped us, just as it stops a lot of the lads who don’t make it. At that stage, there wasn’t a girl who rode well enough. A few hit the scene for a short time but none of us stood the test of time.”
If anyone was looking down and smiling on Blackmore last week, it would have been Jayne Thompson, Jessica Charles-jones and Sharron Murgatroyd, the women who paid a big price for their pioneering spirit.