Blackmore to the fore
Honeysuckle success for trailblazing Irish jockey
Irish jockey outfought and outrode rival in a thrilling finish to the Mares’ Hurdle When Rachael Blackmore hit the front on Honeysuckle and Paul Townend on the odds-on favourite came to challenge her, chauvinists were reciting their lines. “Women aren’t strong enough in a finish. When you need a big race winning, phone a man.”
Except that gender is disappearing in National Hunt racing. Women riders and trainers seem sick of discussing it. The nirvana of a sport without male-female distinctions moves closer with each big Festival win. A jockey is a jockey. A rider is a rider. Focus on the sex of the pilot and you risk sounding dated or even rude.
Great changes are afoot in Flat racing too. But it is over jumps where the point is most forcibly made, because winning at the Festival requires so much strength, skill and courage. A shift was already under way when Blackmore was made second-favourite to be the top jockey at this meeting – be- hind Townend, who came to attack Honeysuckle on the 4-6 favourite
Benie Des Dieux in the £120,000 Mares’ Hurdle, but was outfought and outrun.
Benie Des Dieux’s trainer, Willie Mullins, blamed a tactical “miscommunication” between his runners on the turn for home but Blackmore’s talent was the story racegoers wanted to hear. Honeysuckle lowered her head, grabbed the ground and carried Blackmore, 30, to the most photogenic win of her career and a bigger reception in the winner’s enclosure than the one for Epatante in the Champion Hurdle, the day’s premier race.
“She’s such a special mare to be involved with, it’s a pleasure to ride her, and when it all works out it’s such a kick,” Blackmore said. “I’m just the lucky one that gets her leg across her.”
Too modest by half. Henry de Bromhead, who also won the Arkle Chase with Put The Kettle On, said: “She’s doing it a lot for us. She just seems to be in the right place at the right time. She’s a brilliant rider. She’s a major part of our team and we’re lucky she’s riding our horses as well. She’s putting her faith in us. “She works very hard at it and we work very hard at it. We all know how tough it is to get these results.” Blackmore’s rise in a gilded age for women riders has been spectacular. She won only half a dozen races in the six seasons between 2010 and 2015 but went into orbit from 2016, with 94 winners in Britain and Ireland last term, including A Plus Tard and Minella Indo at the 2019 Cheltenham Festival – where Bryony Frost became the first female rider to win a championship race on Frodon.
The heir, in Irish racing, to Nina Carberry and Katie Walsh, Blackmore arrived in the Cotswolds on a surf of big race wins. At the Dublin Racing Festival she scored a grade one double on Notebook and Honeysuckle. Undulating fortunes, though, are part of a jump jockey’s contract with the sport, and Blackmore’s day started badly, in a way all great riders would recognise. Her mount in the opening Supreme Novices’ Hurdle, Captain Guinness, was brought down two out and in the Arkle Chase Blackmore had a rear view of De Bromhead’s second-string, Put The Kettle On, scooting home under Aidan Coleman.
Her first Cheltenham winners last year established her as a top Festival rider, but to be 4-1 for the top jockey’s crown brings another level of expectation: “Definitely,” she agreed, “I have serious rides all week, and it’s a position every jockey wants to be in, and it’s just great when you deliver and one of them gets you on the scorecard.
“I was trapped in a small bit of a pocket down by the second last but she had plenty in the tank, which is what you want coming up that hill.” A grade one race at Cheltenham confers a special lustre: “Absolutely. Cheltenham is what it’s all about.”
Again, jump racing has made so much progress (there is still a long way to go) that many inside the sport wish we would all shut up about the male-female dynamic. Blackmore told The Telegraph’s racing correspondent Marcus Armytage on the eve of this meeting. “I probably find it a little tiresome within the small racing bubble because I don’t think it should be a thing any more,” she said.
“I get that it would be massive to win a Gold Cup or Champion Hurdle – it would be pretty massive for me, too.
“But my initial feeling wouldn’t be, ‘Ah this is so big for women in racing’. That won’t come into it. But
I’m not oblivious to the fact that it’s a big deal – it’s just something I’m not thinking about now. Henry doesn’t care, the owners don’t care, no one I deal with cares.”
De Bromhead, who trains in County Waterford, knows questions about Blackmore’s sex are inevitable, but steers round them as skilfully as Honeysuckle’s rider got down to work to hold off Benie Des Dieux. He said in the winner’s enclosure: “People say, ‘what’s her best attribute?’ She keeps winning.”