Ex-jockey steps up to senior role at Hastings
Nichelle Milner continues to break ground in old boys’ world
From the age of eight when she got her first pony, Nichelle Milner seemed drawn to a life of speed.
Nothing fazed the Southern California native. Not being tossed repeatedly from that beloved pony, not being thrown from horses. They could break her bones but never her spirit.
Speed gene
Her body is so battered from years as a jockey that she has had to hang up her helmet and boots. But for the last 10 years she has re-directed her energy to learning the business at the racetrack in Portland, qualifying her for the prestigious position of racing secretary when it opened this spring at the Hastings Racecourse.
Her main job is to get the maximum number of horses in the field for each race, to put together the most competitive races and to keep owners and trainers happy. That’s no small task.
All the while, she has broken new ground as a woman in an old boys’ world.
In an interview, the ebullient 44-year-old’s words tumble out in a blur, churning up a whirlwind of memories.
It all began in a family with what her mother calls “the bad gene pool.”
Replace “bad” with “speed” and you get the picture.
Her dad rode motocross, taking the family on motorcycle rides to Mexico. Her brother raced superbikes. She raced horses and her mother — to this day, at the age of 70 — competes in a sport called combined driving in which she steers a team of ponies and wagon at breakneck speed around a treacherous course.
Nichelle was often perched in the wagon with her mother, swaying like a willow in the wind to provide counterbalance so the wagon wouldn’t tip.
Instead of coddling her daughter, her mother scolded her, “Shut up you whiny baby and hang on.”
While growing up, her parents owned a pair of quarter horses at the Los Alamitos track. She also rode as a hunter/jumper. Her world was horses.
Battle scars
After graduating from high school in Oregon, she hightailed it back to California to live with her grandparents, whose house was a stone’s throw from the Santa Anita Park racetrack near Los Angeles. She wanted to be a jockey.
Everyone thought that was kind of cute, coming from this five-foot-nothing girl.
But she talked her way into the back stretch, working her way up as an exercise rider, getting her jockey’s licence and then her big chance in 1989 riding a horse that was a favourite to win.
If she had lost, any hopes of a career as a jockey would have been dashed, given the horse’s odds. But she won. “I swear it was the best race I ever rode in my career.”
She broke her jaw the very next day when a horse reared up and knocked her in the face.
Doctors wired her j aw together. Still she rode. Later the same year, she was thrown from a horse just out of the starting gate. The horse flipped. So did she.
The gate crew ordered her to move because the horses were coming around the track again.
But she couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe.
“It knocked the wind out of me and I just crawled like an army man and I rolled to the inside of the track.”
After learning later she had knocked some of her lower vertebrae out of alignment, she was placed in traction.
About eight weeks later, she rode again.
She suffered a broken nose when a horseshoe flew into her face after a turn, a hematoma after being kicked while in the paddock, and other injuries.
Meanwhile, she savoured the sweet taste of victory on horses that nobody thought could win. She never forced them, never muscled them. She just asked them to go around. And they did.
Then in 1992, she was thrown against a door in a minor offtrack incident. Because of her weakened spine from the 1989 accident, her left arm was paralyzed for seven months.
She never rode the track again.
“It was hard because I didn’t get to decide.”
For the next 10 years, she left horse racing. She couldn’t watch a race on television or talk about it.
Then in 2004, she got word that the paymaster at the track in Portland, Ore., was retiring. Did she want the job?
Changing tracks
She did. For the next decade, like a rider learning to navigate a tricky course, she learned the ins and outs of the horse track business, working her way through the positions of paymaster, entry clerk, assistant racing secretary and quarter-horse racing secretary.
This spring, she got a call from Hastings asking whether she knew of anyone who might want the job of racing secretary here.
Without hesitation, she said yes. She wanted it.
Driven by her adventurous spirit, she landed here at the beginning of May, determined to seize the reins.
“I have to find a way under my watch to keep the horses running,” she said.
Milner knows that idle horses mean idle income for many.
And then there is the sheer joy of the race. She wants everyone to get a taste of it.
She admits there are days when she sees the jockeys and wishes she could still be one of them.
But she is running a race of a different kind now.
Her heart still pounds. “When I put good races out there, I get goose bumps.”