Bailey gets grandad’s okay
Training legend Graeme Rogerson doesn’t want his granddaughter to be a jockey. But now 18-year-old Bailey Rogerson has made up her mind that is what she wants to do, Grandad Graeme is certain she will be good.
“How can she not be? She is starting her apprenticeship with about 50 race rides and 300 trials under her belt,” he says with a smile. “And she is a good horsewoman. So she will make a good jockey.”
Bailey will make her debut as an apprentice jockey today, the day thoroughbred racing is reborn in New Zealand, with the Pukekohe meeting the first since lockdown.
There will be little glamour at the Counties meeting, with our best equine talent either in Australia or tucked up warm in their stables away from heavy11 tracks. But after being starved of racing for three months, today is reason for celebration for thoroughbred fans, with the code the last of the three to return to racing.
What happens next at a time when racing finds itself at the crossroads, with a newly confused identity and the chief executive to lead it into the future still undecided, is impossible to tell. But today beautiful horses, albeit covered in mud, will do what evolution has designed them to do. After months of work, there will be something thoroughbred racing and its punters haven’t had since March — winners.
Rogerson, the 71-year-old horseman who has done almost everything you can in racing, hopes one of those winners will carry his granddaughter.
Bailey has tasted plenty of racing success before. She has ridden three winners as an amateur, trained truckloads as part of the family business Team Rogerson and even owned good horses. At just 18, she has more on her CV than many 30-year-olds in the industry. But she wanted more.
“She came to us during the Covid lockdown and said she wanted to take out a full apprenticeship [trainee jockey] rather than just ride in amateur races,” Graeme told the Weekend Herald. “I wasn’t keen. But she knows what she’s doing and I admire her for having a go. New Zealand racing could do with more young people like her.”
The stable is one of the more forward heading into racing’s resumption and have 10 horses entered today, with Bailey to ride six of them.
“I think she can win on Parisian [race nine],” Graeme says.
Like many of the Team Rogerson runners, Parisian looked fit at the recent marathon Te Rapa trials day, and with Bailey’s claim, he gets huge weight relief.
Rogerson, though, opts for Sweet Treat (race six) as the stable’s best hope at today’s meeting because while she has to carry her full 63kg carded weight, she is a listed winner on a heavy track and meets a very mixed bunch.
“And a horse who really thrived during lockdown was Makabar, and if he gets a run off the ballot in race five, he can go close.”
Rogerson might need some money to offset a new expense the stable wasn’t banking on.
“My owners have always loved Bailey riding at the trials for us because not only does she know the horses, but she was an amateur, so she rode them for free,” Grandad says with a laugh.
“Now I suppose we have to start paying her.”