‘HE PUNCHED ME IN THE RIBS ... SO I BROKE HIS NOSE’
SA women jockeys
THERE’S something about the way Mr Welch knots his tie that makes me wonder if he ever raced horses. Yes, he was a jockey, he says from behind the steering wheel of the jockey academy bus. Retired at 28.
Mr Welch drives apprentices to races. He’s driving four now. Gruelling career jockeys have, he tells me. Back still gives him trouble. “Takes a toll on your body. Most guys don’t stay long. You get tired.”
I ask him if he knows of the woman jockey. That’s right: the woman jockey. There are more than 100 of the male kind.
“Justine King?” She was one of his appies. Just qualified. “Tough sport for a girl. Haven’t been many. Lisa . . . what is it? Prestwood. She did all right. But most girls don’t stay long. They have babies.” Mr Welch straightens his tie.
Tough sport for girls. One reveals: “This other jock, hey, he punched me in the ribs after a race. So I broke his nose.” Since then, she says, she was never hassled again.
An estimated 15 South African women have raced locally in the past two decades, none in the Durban July.
“You aren’t allowed in here. It’s filled with sweaty men,” I’m scolded when I follow apprentice Denise Lee from Mr Welch’s bus to the Kenilworth racecourse jockey room.
Lee is the only girl now at the SA Jockey Academy. Since the 2009 intake, every other woman has dropped out before the end of her five-year term. Plenty of boys leave every year, too, but there are more of them.
There are already 10 girls on next year’s waiting list, but Charles Grey, academy marketing manager, says they favour male applicants. “Girls don’t cut it in this game. Horse racing isn’t ‘ladies first’. There’s no time for make-up, hairdos, or falling pregnant. You will be bitten, kicked, bucked off and hurt, whether you like it or not.”
Tex Lerena, national manager of the South African Jockeys’ Association, says no one has blocked women from horse racing, but: “They can’t perform for a full 30 days because of their ‘womanly thing’. Put a woman and a man in a boxing ring and the guy will have the edge. That’s just how it is. No man wants his daughter on a racehorse.” Lerena’s uncle was a jockey. His son is a jockey. He was a jockey too. Retired at 37.
Another retired jock turned academy man adds that women “lose their nerve” on the racecourse. I ask him if he ever lost to a woman. He laughs. “Yes. It’s embarrassing.”
Although still in the minority, women jocks fare better overseas; look at UK racing sensation Hayley Turner. Before 1993, a woman couldn’t even get a jockey licence in South Africa, so the first girl on our turf was an American, Kathy Kusner.
Things changed 20 years ago when Genevieve Michel, then 14, banged on the academy gates. Denied. She went back four times until they said: very well. They took blood tests, made her sprint up stairs, measured her shin bone.
A retired jockey told Michel — the academy’s first female apprentice since it opened its doors 35 years earlier — “Succeed and we’ll build a girls’ dormitory. Fail and we won’t accept any more girls.”
Michel, now 35, says it was like walking into hell. “You pick up horse shit with your bare hands. You run from stable to stable until the last horse is finished. Then you do it again the next day. It was in my blood, being a jockey. You have to want it. This isn’t about pretty horses. It’s hard labour.”
She dropped the pitch of her voice. She lifted weights. “Horse racing is a man’s world. Always has been. Out there, you grow a pair of balls. I was sure the jocks
HE PUNCHED ME IN THE RIBS AFTER A RACE. SO I BROKE HIS NOSE
wanted to do me in. I was pissing on their territory, trying to do something that had never been done. I’d be pushed up against a rail in a race. They didn’t give two hoots. It was always, ‘Watch where you’re going, bitch.’ After three years, I was one of them.”
Her horse bucked. That’s the last thing she remembers before she woke up in hospital. It seemed surreal, this surgeon telling her: “It’s the end of your career.” It took a year before she could stand to watch anyone race. A cross conceals the scar where she broke her neck. “God has other plans for you,” a pastor told her.
Before her accident, Michel raced in the J&B Met: the first woman to do so. The academy built the girls’ dormitory.
Nadine Rapson, 33, recalls limping up those dormitory steps after a day of training. She left home at 15 to join the academy. A rider since five, she had to be retrained. It was like breaking in a horse. “I was used to riding in a regular saddle with my feet down, not tucked under my chin.”
She rode 30 horses every day. She got fit. “It’s about skill. I don’t care how strong you are. If half-a-ton wants to argue with you, who do you think will win?” Some horses prefer what’s called “soft hands” and only run for girls, says Rapson, who was often put on the “dillies” — mad horses. “Sometimes empathy goes further than a thrashing.”
After just three months, Rapson rode her first race. “You’re a 15-year-old girl up against men who were racing before you were born.” She grew up.
“A jock’s life is physical and mental torture. You work yourself to the bone looking after those horses, only to watch someone else win on them on race day. Promises are broken. You fall and break bones. And then you get that chance, and you ride that winner, and you get up and do it all again. I’ve loved horses since I knew what a horse was.”
And she did get up, again and again, even after she bashed her skull in a fall and forgot her own name. A trainer warned her not to come asking for rides. “I won’t be the one who kills a mother.”
But it’s the race rides that pay the bills. “If you don’t make it as a jockey, if you’re injured and can’t ride anymore, you’re screwed, because this is all you’ve ever known,” says Rapson.
Getting the race rides is half the battle. “People would say, ‘Oh, you’re a jockey. Do girls even do that? When did you and your horse last race?’ I’d tell them that we don’t own horses. We just ride them, if we’re lucky. I’d run second in a race and I’d be pulled off because the owner said, ‘If it had had a guy on, it would have won’. Too bad if the horse is mad or slow or both. If you want the work, you ride it.”
All is equal on the racecourse. If the jocks called her “bitch”, Rapson says, they also called each other “bastard”. Besides, she swore back.
Some women quote trainers who said, “I’ll give you a ride if you ride me”. “You can keep your bloody ride,” was one woman’s reply.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or woman,” says Lerena. “If you’re on a good horse, you’ll win.” But first you have to get the good horses. “Lucky breaks. That’s what these girls need,” says a trainer. Sounds like the name of a horse.
Not all jockeys are small. Lisa “Iron Lady” Prestwood isn’t, I discover when I meet her at her home. Soft hands? No. Hers are calloused.
“You can’t be a bunny-hugger,” she says. “I wouldn’t let the horse get the upper hand. I could never be as strong as the men, so I had to outsmart them.”
She shows me a photograph of herself astride a gelding. “That’s Al Nitak. He was a raving lunatic. Men were scared to ride him.” Mad horses. I’ve heard about those.
In South Africa, you can’t get higher than a Grade 1 race. Prestwood, now 42, won two on Al Nitak, a 66-to-1 long shot. Down the straight, you’d see the colours of her silks blur in the dust as she hunkered over his stretched neck.
“They told you we leave because of babies? Where’s my whip? I could think of nothing better than my son shouting, ‘Go, Mum!’ at the winning post.”
By the time illness ended Prestwood’s decade-long career, she had beaten all the country’s top sprinters and male jocks.
Success didn’t come easily. “They said I was too light for light work and too heavy for fast work,” she says. “I’d walk into a trainer’s ring, tip my hat and say, ‘Morning sir, may I take a horse for you?’ And he’d say: ‘No thank you’. You can be as tough as the next guy. The men in this country still aren’t open to us. Guys battle too. Yes, it’s harder for girls, but you suck it up or get out.”
When she started out in the ’90s, there was no women’s changing room at the racecourse. She changed in a toilet cubicle. “I was told to go back to the kitchen where I belong. Eventually they realised I wasn’t leaving. They called me a bitch. They were right. It’s not about being liked. This game is about winning. Nothing else.”
I ask her about riding mad Al Nitak and she crouches in her living room, reliving those races. “We’re at the 400m finish and I tap it, tap it. Come on, come on!” She thwacks her old stick against the couch. “Go, go, go! I stretch it further, further, and at the winning post it must stop. That’s when the race is finished.”
She sits, sips her tea. Then she says after a pause, her German shepherd resting its head in her lap, “You have to be born with it.” “With what?” I ask. “The will to win.” Michel is a mother now and races mountain bikes. Prestwood trains dogs. Rapson fractured her back for the second time. She is now boarded. She isn’t sure if she’ll be able to race again.
Denise Lee hopes to qualify this year.
THIS ISN’T ABOUT PRETTY HORSES. IT’S HARD LABOUR