‘Women are stronger than men’ – how hero Blackmore rose to top
hthose who guided the first female jockey to win the Grand National during her formative years reveal the tough and determined route to her historic feat
Stardom, Rachael Blackmore once suggested, was a status best reserved for Beyonce, not her. Even after scripting a real-life National Velvet, as the first female jockey to win the world’s greatest steeplechase, she has resisted trumpeting herself as a trailblazer. But her admirers across an Irish racing community still absorbing her feat are not quite so coy. Take trainer Ted Walsh, who, as father to Katie – the first woman rider to be placed in the Grand National nine years ago – understands every detail of the fraught path that has brought us to this point. “I’m 71, and it’s one of the great achievements in sport I have lived to see,” he reflects. “It’s gigantic.”
He remembers a time when women still could not ride racehorses against men, when there had yet even to be a licensed female trainer. For all that racing was once rife with chauvinism, the outspoken Walsh, whose son Ruby is the most decorated jockey in Cheltenham Festival history, is cut from very different cloth. Indeed, Blackmore’s achievement encourages him to double down on a bracingly progressive view of gender relations. “Women in general are stronger than men,” he argues. “They’re better able to put up with disasters. They don’t lie as much as men either. We tell cock-and-bull stories to get ourselves out of situations. Women say, ‘Put up with it’.”
Blackmore has put up with her share of frustrations en route to becoming racing’s undisputed “alpha female”, not least finding her every victory framed in terms of her sex. Today, she can hold up her trophies as Grand National winner and Cheltenham’s leading jockey as rebukes to any presumption that she would be limited by physiology. Mostly, she prefers simply to screen out the noise. While she insists she will throw a party to toast her Aintree triumph once Covid-19 restrictions allow, she has been in Limerick this week, invited solely in her next quest to usurp Paul Townend as Ireland’s champion jump jockey.
Theirs is a rivalry that reaches back to the very start of Blackmore’s story. She was just 13 when, on a sodden Cork day, she won her maiden pony race, beating Townend by a length. In grainy video footage of the moment, shot through a rain-spattered lens and showing a course lined with hay bales, Blackmore conducts her interview with breathless pride. The voice is a couple of octaves higher, but the pure joy of racing is unmistakably hers.
“Rachael was extremely enthusiastic,” says Clare Corballis, who mentored her at Tipperary Pony Club, near her home in Killenaule. “She always wanted to do anything with horses. She would take anything, ride anything, such was her love of speed. She didn’t always have the easiest animals. But she would be meticulous in her care of them. Anything Rachael did, she did properly.”
It was a trait with which Jim “Shark” Hanlon, a redheaded bear of a man and a charismatic
‘Rachael is no prima donna, she knows the horses are the main cog in the wheel’
fixture of the Irish scene, would soon grow familiar. No sooner did she come recommended by Davy Russell, three times Irish champion, than she was riding her first winner for him in 2001, in a ladies’ handicap hurdle at Thurles, on Stowaway Pearl. “I have never had as good a worker around the yard. And I won’t ever again. She’s a superb horsewoman. If any horse had a little injury, she would be going off to bandage it. Nothing was too big or too small for her. It’s a big part of why she’s such a good rider.”
What worried Hanlon were the falls. Blackmore had always been restless for success, from the second she began hunting with the family on her father Charles’s dairy farm. But once she turned 20, the desire was all-consuming.