GIVE BRYONY SOME SPACE.

​How the Frosts cope with the adulation heaped upon their daughter is beyond my imagination. I am not suggesting she is undeserving of the universal praise, only that her parents know her, whereas her admirers only know of her. Her parents can, no doubt, recount stories of disobedience and perhaps even insolence, of tears and tantrums and interrogation in the wake of nights out with boyfriends who in the eyes of loving parents rarely come up to scratch.
As I have said before, Bryony Frost is the best publicity this sport has ever had. We must neither waste her talent as a jockey, which must be the first consideration, nor her ability to transmit to her audience her love of horses and of the sport she already dominates. We must not put her on a pedestal. She maybe a star but she is also human. We must not take advantage of her.
It would be wrong to expect her to carry the weight of the sport’s image on her own. Yes, if the B.H.B. could bottle her enthusiasm and passion it would have a new funding stream. But that is not possible. What is possible, though, is that the sport’s participants, jockeys, trainers, stewards, racing’s administrators, etc, take a leaf from her book and begin the process of extenuating the positives our sport has to offer. Bryony is a young woman embarking on a dangerous and difficult career-path. She may be a pathfinder for professional female jockeys. She may be the darling of racegoers and even punters. She may be a breaker of glass ceilings. But most of all she is a jockey and a human being and for all its good intentions the stakeholders of this sport must give her space to pursue her career and to live her young life.
Bryony cannot correct the trajectory of our sport, nor should we expect her to. In today’s Racing Post, David Jennings suggested that the stars of our sport are the jockeys and that if they were media trained the moment they receive their jockeys’ licence the sport would be better served. He might be correct in his opinion. But he does not listen to Bryony, to her narrative. The horses are the stars. He says horses cannot talk. But they can. Frodon and Altior spoke to their public last week and racegoers lapped up their message. Surprisingly, for a change, the B.H.B. have something right. The sport has to put the horse first in all matters. Jockeys must talk about their mounts, not themselves.
I recently read about a trainer in the late twenties who was in the habit of whistling to his approaching horses on the gallops, which he said encouraged them to go faster. At the races he would stand at the winning post whistling as loud as he could in the believe that his horses would try that bit harder as the winning post neared. The story made headlines in the newspapers and encouraged editors to tell their correspondents to come up with similar stories, taking racing from sport to the general interest pages of the newspapers. Perhaps horse racing columnists and writers should seek out interesting racing related stories and submit them to the daily and regional newspapers, to take the sport from the back to the inside pages.
Although it is perfectly understandable, he had achieved his greatest ambition, after all, but on pulling up Paul Townsend talked about himself, Willie Mullins and the owners of Al Boum Photo, without hardly mentioning the horse itself. This was, of course, in stark contrast to Bryony Frost’s post-race interview. (Not that it was an interview in the common sense of the word as all Oli Bell did was switch her on and away she bubbled like a fountain of passion and exuberance.)
Yes, Bryony is a joy. But we must allow her to rest in the shadows. If her injury scare of yesterday is no more than a scare, we have the expectation of post-race ‘interviews’ at Aintree in a few weeks. She is the gift that keeps on giving. But we mustn’t ask too much of her. Horse Racing is not in need of a saviour. Not at the moment, anyway. Though give the B.H.A. a few more months of foot-in-mouth incompetence and her exuberant word-play might be needed to save us from the freefall of internecine distrust between the sport’s rulers and those they rule. Aintree, as Ted Walsh is fond of warning us, is not Disney World. It is expecting too much to expect Black Corton to win the Grand National and put the sport back on the front pages of the daily newspapers.