It’s almost a year since she hung up her boots, so which female jockeys have slipped into the vast void left by a true ‘trailblazer’?
This year’s Cheltenham Festival will be undertaken in the presence of a rather large Rachael Blackmore-shaped hole.
The superstar jockey, whose professional riding career spanned a decade, announced her retirement via a social media post in May last year. Last month, and now married to fellow jockey Brian Hayes, she revealed that she was pregnant.
Blackmore may have stepped away from riding winners (her current roles include serving as Cheltenham’s ‘Head of Ladies Day’), but her legacy, for now at least, continues to burn bright.
‘Trailblazer’ may be a term too often overused, but it’s hard to find a better label to assign to Blackmore.
The first female jockey to win a Grand National (she did that on Minella Times in 2021, sadly to empty stands with the coronavirus pandemic ongoing) and the first female jockey to enter the winner’s enclosure victorious after a Cheltenham Gold Cup.
That was aboard A Plus Tard in March 2022, all of 11 months after the Grand National heroics that earned her RTÉ Sports Person of the Year and BBC World Sport Star of the Year laurels.
She was given an honorary MBE in 2023 and joined a select band of jockeys – Lester Piggott, Tony McCoy and Frankie Dettori perhaps her only colleagues in that category – who might, however briefly, have entered public consciousness outside the British racing bubble.
It was only this time last year that Blackmore gathered her last Grade 1 title at the Cheltenham Festival, taking Bob Olinger to an almost two-length victory in the Stayers’ Hurdle for Henry de Bromhead, her longtime expounder, who also trained A Plus Tard and Honeysuckle, the multiple Grade 1-winning mare with whom she’ll be forever associated.
Blackmore’s career was one of many ‘firsts’, but she was by no means the first female jump jockey to mix it at the top.
Bryony Frost, for instance, who now flits between France and Britain, began her professional career only a couple of years after Blackmore and is already a Grade 1 winner herself.
And, while Blackmore may have laid claim to two of Britain – and the world’s – largest jumping prizes, when Lizzie Kelly won the Kauto Star Novices’ Chase in 2015, the year Blackmore turned professional, it was she who became the first female jockey to win a Grade 1 jumps race in Great Britain.
Add to the mix the fact that it wasn’t so long ago that Katie Walsh and Nina Carberry called it a day on the other side of the Irish Sea – Walsh retiring with a brace of big wins to her name and Carberry with the honour of having been the first female jockey to win a Grade 1 jumps race in Ireland – and Blackmore is merely the latest in a line of ‘trailblazers’.
Walsh remains a regular on horseback at Irish racecourses, albeit only as an RTÉ interviewer, while Carberry won RTÉ’s Dancing with the Stars a few years after her racing retirement and since 2024 has been a member of the European Parliament.
Which leaves us with an obvious question. Who, in the absence of those aforementioned contemporaries, has stepped into Blackmore’s boots when it comes to top-level female jump jockey representation in the British Isles?
Frost is still riding, often at the upper echelons, but often in France – and she doesn’t hold nearly the same profile as Blackmore.
Then there’s Lilly Pinchin, who’s in her mid-20s and has been praised for efforts in detailing the difficulties of holding down a riding career with ADHD.
But she’s yet to win a Grade 1.
Unlike the Flat where, even with Hayley Turner having now left weighing rooms for good, there remain the likes of Hollie Doyle and Saffie Osborne, British and Irish jump racing seems to be suffering from an acute dearth of female riding role models, given that it could take another few years for the results of Blackmore’s efforts to be properly visible, and for the new recruits she has inspired to rise through the ranks.
We’ve just marked International Women’s Day, a day for racing and other equestrian sports – racing’s cousins – to rightfully celebrate their status as one of the few sports in which male and female human participants compete on equal terms.
But unless another Rachael Blackmore arrives in the jump racing ranks sharpish, it’s a fact that could pass the public by. To racing’s giant detriment.
Before the war, Debbie Burt attended the HH The Amir Sword Festival in Qatar
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