It was not the women’s day – but their time is surely coming
Bryony Frost comes home in fine fifth place as the wait for a female winner goes on for another year
As Davy Russell steered home the diminutive Tiger Roll to victory in the Grand National, high in the terraces at the top of Aintree’s Princess Royal Stand, there was the familiar confetti shower of ripped up betting slips from the disappointed punters who had backed other horses.
One woman, teetering atop a pair of Shard-scale heels, seemed particularly despondent as she flung her discarded paperwork into the Liverpool evening. “So much for the revolution,” she said. She had a point.
Here were the most successful trainer, owner and jockey at the recent Cheltenham Festival combining again to win the National. Here was a victory for the established order, a victory for tradition. Because Russell was not just holding off the last-ditch efforts of the second placed Pleasant Company in that desperate battle for the line. He was holding back a seismic upheaval.
This was billed as the National when, never mind wizened old stagers like the 38-year-old Russell, the women were about to accede to the throne. In the build-up, the most substantial contingent of female riders since 1988 had seized the agenda.
In the fizz of attention, the three female jockeys concerned had shied away from the symbolism; they were just doing their job, they all insisted, they weren’t revolutionaries they were just riders hoping to win. But the rest of us could not disguise the sense of anticipation, the thought that we might be witness to sporting history.
Seated on proper horses, horses with a real chance rather than the kind of tokenist mounts women have received in the past, it was reckoned there had never been a better chance for a female rider in the National to improve on Katie Walsh’s third place in 2012.
Walsh was back for her sixth attempt to win it, joined by the debutants Bryony Frost and Rachael Blackmore. These were the harbingers of the new order. And, however hard they tried to downplay it, the significance was clear: one of them winning here would signal the time when jump racing became recognised as a truly gender-blind sport.
The excitement was not confined to the media: 36 per cent of the bets in the build-up had been placed on Walsh’s horse Baie Des Iles, trained by her husband, Ross O’Sullivan. By Friday, the odds had narrowed to 8-1 for one of the women riders winning.
As the race hove into view, however, the support diminished. Though according to those in the know, there was nothing sexist about it. It was all in the name.
“On the day, recreational punters come out and shape the market,” explained Nicola McGeady of Ladbrokes. “And they tend to back striking names.” Hence the money piled in behind Chase The Spud and Captain Redbeard. And not the French names of Walsh’s Baie Des Iles or Blackmore’s mount Alpha des Obeaux. Frost, meanwhile, was on Milansbar, a moniker that hardly leapt out.
But it was not hard to find supporters for the women riders. Never mind that for the first time ever there was a clash with a local football match.
As Liverpool kicked off against Bournemouth at Anfield, the horses were beginning their second lap of the course and 70,000 had turned up to Aintree. This was Merseyside en fete, the terraces rammed with revelry.
Around the Red Rum Garden Bar there were more fascinators than at a
Princess Eugenie lookalike convention. Everywhere trousers were tight, heels were high, skinhugging tops the fashionable order. And that was just among the men.
The names of the trailblazing women jockeys were on everyone’s lips. Well almost. “I went for whatsername,” explained Ruth, who had come from Yorkshire with a gaggle of friends to the race for the first time. “Oh, you know. Katie? Anyhow she’s a woman, so I did it to support the women. Solidarity!”
At the Tote kiosk beneath the Princess Royal Stand, the man taking the bets confided that, if anyone was after a tip, they might be wise to choose a woman. “It’s got to happen one day,” was his reasoning. “So why not today?”
He had backed Bryony Frost. “Her dad won it didn’t he?” he said of the great Jimmy, who came first in 1989. “It’s in the genes. And racing’s all about genes.” It was not a bad shout.
As the riders came out for the start of the race, Frost was the first to emerge, galloping down the course on her own, taking in the geography, assessing her path.
Behind her, Walsh stood out in her pink silks, her horse the field’s only grey. In the scramble of early fences – as the crowd oohed and aahed as the horses they had backed tumbled – Blackmore was involved in a nasty collision at the Chair. But, as the field began to thin out, Frost and Walsh remained in the saddle, sticking to the first rule of the National: stay in it to win it.
And, even as Walsh’s mount began to tire, slipping back through the field, so Frost kept at it. Maybe not with any realistic chance of hauling back the leading rider, she did not relent. Eventually she galloped home in a hugely creditable fifth place, with Walsh’s exhausted Baie Des Iles coming in 12th.
“We went on a lovely evening gallop and he rode in his own space,” Frost said afterwards, delighted in her ride. “I hope he sleeps as well as I will tonight.” The truth was Russell’s nerveless, late intervention ensured it may not have been the seismic, women-empowering moment we had expected. But Frost can happily sleep well in the knowledge that she had just demonstrated that women’s time is surely soon. It will happen.