Rachael Blackmore changed the game, but racing still has so much more to prove

No woman had broken through simply because it wasn’t ­physically possible, they said. It will never ­happen. Neither good enough nor strong enough for this rarefied macho ­pursuit, you see. Too soft. Bodies the wrong shape. We even fall the wrong way, apparently.

Yet now jump racing’s principal ­trophies all have Blackmore’s name on them. Lester Piggott, Ginger McCain, Julian Wilson, everyone with whom I ever endured this infuriating discussion – your boys took one hell of a beating. That’s what her successes meant to me as a fan and longstanding journalist in the sport – the end of 40 years’ vicarious hurt.

Not that Blackmore sees it like this. That’s just the way she is – modest to a fault, always downplaying the significance of her gender. “I just feel so lucky,” she said in her retirement statement last week, “to have been legged up on the horses I have, and to have ­experienced ­success I never dreamt could be possible.” Lucky is the word she habitually uses to describe her courage, ­resilience, persistence and poise. She changed a game that didn’t want to be changed – a game that even now, judged by cold deeds rather than warm words, appears oddly ­complacent about its pioneer. Not least because I don’t yet see any women climbing up through the shards of glass behind her.

Women weren’t even permitted to ride under Jockey Club rules in Britain until 1972. It took the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 to force progress over jumps, enabling Diana Thorne to win an amateur race against men one year later.

In 1978, Lorna Vincent and Karen Wiltshire became the first women, over jumps and on the Flat ­respectively, to triumph against fellow professionals. The following decade, amateurs Caroline Beasley and Gee Armytage each registered success at the elite Cheltenham Festival, while Gay Kelleway became the first woman to win at Royal Ascot in 1987.

Yet that latter feat was unmatched for 32 years because – despite Julie Krone proving it could be done with a brilliant career in the United States – female progress largely flatlined in Britain. Deep into the 1990s, any ­professional success was perceived as the gift of the husbands or fathers who trained the horses.

It was left to Ireland to drag the sport into the 21st century. Amateurs Nina Carberry and Katie Walsh, both hailing from illustrious racing ­dynasties, were the new wave. On retiring within a day of each other in April 2018, together they had amassed 10 Cheltenham Festival and two Irish National victories.

If they were the ellipsis, Blackmore was an unlikely full stop. Eyebrows were raised when trainer Shark Hanlon persuaded this unremark­able amateur to turn professional – the first woman to do so over jumps in Ireland since Maria Cullen in the 1980s. The only idea was to limit the danger to which she was exposed by improving the standard of her horses.

Starting out aged 25, nearly a decade older than most fledgling jockeys, six months passed before her first professional winner. Camouflaged by obscurity, she applied her greater maturity to learning fast from a ­novice’s inevitable mistakes. By 2017, she had grafted her way to the Irish conditional (novice) jockeys’ championship, the first woman to win it.

She became fitter and more focused than those who had gone before, with a physical courage often remarked on. “Rachael gets some awful falls but she bounces back up,” Walsh has said. “I know I wouldn’t have been able to take some of the falls she has – I just wouldn’t.”

Blackmore’s life changed gear when Eddie O’Leary, brother of Ryanair chief executive Michael, began regularly to employ her for their powerful Gigginstown Stud operation and even booked her to ride in the 2018 Grand National. A chance conversation in the back of an Aintree-bound taxi saw O’Leary recommend her to upwardly mobile trainer Henry de Bromhead.

It was the beginning of a partnership that would conquer pretty much every major race. “I never gave her our job,” de Bromhead has admitted. “She just kept riding winners.” These included, just the following March, the first of her 18 successes at the Cheltenham Festival. Only eight ­jockeys in the history of the sport have ridden more.

While her Grand National triumph on Minella Times in 2021 reverberated around the globe, her Festival record is a more accurate measure of her stature – including two Champion Hurdles on prolific mare Honeysuckle and the 2022 Gold Cup, the pinnacle of jump racing, on A Plus Tard. Her final success there, on Bob Olinger in the Stayers’ Hurdle, made her only the third jockey to capture the Festival’s ‘Big Five’ races, a feat that eluded even Tony McCoy.

Yet when she conjured that unexpected success for de Bromhead two months ago, there was a palpable sense of having proved herself all over again. The previous September, she had sustained a serious neck injury in a fall at Downpatrick. On her return after three months’ arduous rehabilitation, winners were slower to come by and she hadn’t automatically resumed as the stable’s No 1.

Perhaps this was on her mind when, after the Punchestown Festival passed without success, she decided Ma Belle Etoile would be her final career winner at Cork last Saturday. What more did she need to prove? Nothing, is the answer. She did everything. She is everything.

Whereas the sport she leaves behind still has so much to prove. Its decision-makers have basked in Blackmore’s reflected glory, enjoying the young people queuing for her autograph and the image of equality projected to the outside world.

They have trumpeted the idea that men and women compete on equal terms.

Yet scandalously, four out of five British racecourses missed a deadline last October to modernise their discriminatory facilities. Ten venues still don’t plan to start agreed improvements until 2027 at best. The jockeys’ union claims interim measures aren’t working at seven tracks, meaning female jockeys remain routinely disadvantaged at their place of work.

Data also indicates men remain disproportionately favoured in terms of access to rides and this key determinant to success, or even a viable career, gets harder the more successful you become. In plain terms, on the comparatively rare occasions a woman is booked, it tends to be on an inferior horse in a lesser race.

So, now Blackmore has exited the stage, I am resigned to waiting again. I fear the sport will settle for regarding her as exceptional without grasping its failure as an enabler.

I don’t doubt she has inspired a new generation of female riders and that racing will see the fruits of her endeavours in 10 or more years’ time. I hope by then it will finally have stepped up.

Photograph by Alan Crowhurst/Getty Images