On the injury that crushed her Grand National hopes
Bryony Frost tells Jim White about the fall that ended her 2019 Aintree dream – and why she’s not a pioneer
For Bryony Frost, tomorrow will be a tricky day. She will be at Aintree, at the age of just 23, making her debut as a television pundit during ITV’S coverage of the Grand National. But for her there will be little sense of achievement. Because this year’s edition of the nation’s favourite steeplechase was a race in which she hoped to compete. And it is one that many observers felt she had a very good chance of winning, which would have made her the first female jockey to do so.
“I’ll have two hearts: one of them will be flying, buzzing off the experience,” she says. “The other is going to be crying.”
Last month, Frost broke her sport’s glass ceiling when she became the first woman to win a Group One race at the Cheltenham Festival. Her giddy response to triumph in the Ryanair Chase delighted even those who would not know a hurdle from a hedge. She beamed from the front of every newspaper, her poetic language reported with gusto.
“He is Pegasus, he has wings. He is the perfection of determination,” she said of her horse Frodon as she made her way from the winning line. It is hard to recall any other jockey being quite so articulate on having a microphone thrust in their face immediately after such triumph; most require the services of the censor’s bleeper.
And after finishing fifth last year in the National, there was a gathering belief that Frost could continue her victory lap around Aintree, thus marking the moment that the sport of jump racing
finally became gender blind. But four days after Cheltenham, in a race at Southwell, Frost fell and broke her collarbone. It means tomorrow, as she sits in the commentary box with her arm in a sling, she will not be a forerunner but a chronicler of others’ successes.
“Normally when you get injured you hide away, take yourself off somewhere you can’t be reached,” she says from the country inn where we meet, close to the training yard in her Somerset base. “I’m putting myself out there. There’s going to be no hiding.”
Frost is an extraordinary athlete. Blessed with a singular ability to coax a horse around a course, she can lay claim to being not only Britain’s best female rider, but the finest young jockey around. Right now she leads by a distance the conditional riders championship (a competition for those under the age of 26) leaving a field of men in her wake. This season, only her second as a professional rider, she has accumulated nearly £1million in prize money for the owners of the horses she has ridden to triumph. Sober analysis suggests this friendly, enthusiastic young woman has every chance of one day becoming a champion jockey. She is already a contender for the Sports Personality of the Year. She would like to make clear, however, that there is one thing she is not: a feminist pioneer.
“I paddle my own canoe,” she says. “I never set out to break any perceptions, break the mould or stand out. I’ve never thought I was writing history books. I want to be me. Wherever that leads, I’m cool with that.”
Everything she is doing is for herself, she remonstrates. And the horses she rides.
“I understand them better than people if I’m honest,” Frost, who is “obsessed” with the animals, admits. For her, being a jockey is “like speed dating, you might only meet a horse the morning [of ] a race. You have to fall in love very fast.”
But then if anyone was going to learn how to read horses it was Bryony Frost. Her father, Jimmy, rode Little Polveir to victory in the Grand National in 1989 before setting up a training yard in Devon and here, six years after his triumph, she was born – and almost immediately placed in the saddle.
“First time I opened my eyes, a horse was there,” she says in her gentle Devonian lilt. “I had a donkey called Nosey as a babysitter. Mainly because my parents were too tight to get a human babysitter. I was on Nosey all day, every day. And I was mad for horses. I remember going into Grandad’s workshop and nicking a pair of aluminium racing shoes and nailing them to the bottom of my trainers. Even when I wasn’t riding one, I sounded like a horse.”
Hers was, she says, “a feral upbringing.” With two sons already, her mother had “always wanted a girlie girl” – Frost failed to meet this expectation, however, being “more boyish than any of the boys”.
Not least in the manner in which she pursued her career: this was a woman in a hurry. By the time she was 19, such was her success on the point to point circuit, she had been recruited by the champion trainer Paul Nicholls as an apprentice jockey. Rapidly, she learnt how to cope with the inevitable toll this most demanding of sports takes on
‘I never set out to break the mould or rewrite history books’
a rider’s body. She had been given an early indication of that when, as a 15 year old, she had a horrible fall, the horse landing on her midriff, causing complicated kidney damage. But the very suggestion that this might have put her off she regards as ridiculous.
“If anything, it was a good thing,” she says. “I learnt you can overcome a lot in your mind. When I had that fall nothing hurt as much. So now when I fall, I look back and say to myself: does it hurt as much as that? No? Well get back up. If you can move, get up.”
Indeed when she fell at Southwell, she tried to do just that. Despite the terrible crunching sounds coming from her shoulder, never mind making the National, she thought she could continue riding that same day. Medical intervention soon insisted on a month-long lay off.
“Missing out on any race makes your heart cry, but the National…” she says. “But you can’t feel sorry for yourself. Self pity won’t work. You’re here, deal with it, make sure you’re improving. If you treat it right, you can make up for lost time.”
In the weeks since, she has, she says, become a willing student of recuperation techniques, asking everyone she encounters for their tips on recovery. But then Frost has long believed that behaving “like a sponge” is the only way to improve. And that, she adds, is the lesson she would like to pass on. Gender is irrelevant: what matters is a willingness to improve.
“I think you pave your own road, I do believe if you have determination, love and passion you will achieve. The day I stop improving is the day I’ll hang my boots up.”
That goes beyond riding.
“I’ll always believe you can be better in every way. I have to be better. Not just as a rider. But as a person. I want to be more helpful, kinder, more considerate. Better.”
Spending time with Frost only adds to the feeling that, while it may not be this year or even next, victory in the Grand National is one day inevitable.
Read more at telegraph.co.uk/racing, and pick up your special 16-page Grand National supplement with tomorrow’s Telegraph