LADY JOCKEYS.

​Anyone who trawls through what is becoming an extended archive of this site will be aware that I am supportive of female jockeys. In an overly competitive sporting market, I feel horse racing, the flat especially, is making a great oversight in not acknowledging that 50% of the world’s population is female and that there should be a limited amount of positive discrimination to have that figure represented on the racecourse. To this effect I have suggested (I would like to claim to have campaigned but as a muted voice in the wilderness it would be too big a boast) there should be a major flat race restricted to professional female jockeys from all around the world. This should be the most valuable race anywhere in the world restricted to female riders. I believe such a race would be very well supported by the public.
Over the jumps, of course, this kind of positive discrimination is not required. Bryony Frost is the most popular jockey riding, perhaps greater loved than even Frankie Dettori. And Rachael Blackmore has brought a whole new dimension to racing in Ireland over the past two seasons. It is true, though not in the case of Rachael Blackmore, that female jump jockeys benefit from family alliances. Although Bryony has gained her fame through riding for Paul Nicholls and Neil King, her father is a trainer and she was brought up able to ride whenever she wanted to. Lucy Alexander would not be where she is without her father holding a trainer’s licence and the same can be said for Lizzie Kelly, the most underrated jockey in the country by my estimation, and her stepfather. Bridget Andrews would perhaps still be an amateur if it was not for the support of Harry Skelton and her soon-to-be brother-in-law Dan.
These family alliances are not apparent on the flat. What Hayley Turner, Josephine Gordon, Nicola Currie, Holly Doyle and others have achieved is perhaps more commendable because they do not enjoy the leg-up of having a parent holding a trainers’ licence.
What has to said is that where jockeys are self-employed sportsman, the people who employ them are not sportsmen but very similar to a C.E.O. of a multi-million-pound business. When Sir Michael Stoute is dressed in his cricket-whites he is most definitely a sportsman but as boss of Freemason Lodge he is charged with ensuring maximum earnings for the people who pay him to win races with their racehorses. If Ryan Moore is available his clients will feel cheated if he were to employ Hayley, Nicola or male jockeys with a similar score in the jockeys table.
Where the situation is wrong, where flat racing is shooting itself in the foot, is when a female jockey is jocked-off a horse they have consistently ridden in favour of a male jockey when that horse is upped in grade. It is also lamentable when the excuse is made that the female jockey lacks experience in big races. Well, they always will if no one gives them the opportunity to sample what its like to be at the sharp end of a major race.
I greatly admire Hayley Turner. This sport, let alone her female colleagues, owe her a debt the sport is slow in repaying. When the next history of flat racing is produced her achievements will be documented. She has won the equivalent of 3 Group 1’s yet next week at Ascot she will be lucky a have a single ride. My only problem with Hayley is that she is too darn nice, too easily accepting the status quo. It was a disgrace last week in Paris when the ladies French Open semi-finals were held on an outside court in the rain and wind at ten in the morning and it is equally dishonouring to the female sex that no female jockey at Royal Ascot next week will ride any horse with anything like a half-decent chance of winning.
Remember the stir Bryony caused at Cheltenham this year. Front page of The Times and Telegraph and she did not even win one of National Hunt’s holy grail races. Imagine the response if a female rider won the Ascot Gold Cup, the Derby, or any of the classics. The question in today’s Racing Post is when will a female jockey win a race at Royal Ascot. It is over thirty years since Gay Kelleway won the Queen Alexandria on a horse trained by her father and no female in the intervening years has sampled a similar triumph.
It was notable last week that though Nicola Currie rides the majority of Jamie Osborne’s horses, when Lust For Life ran at Newcastle with the express purpose of acquiring a winner’s penalty to get him into the Royal Hunt Cup, even though she was at the meeting, it was Jamie Spencer who was entrusted with the ride. The horse didn’t win, by the way. Now, I don’t know if Nicola is stable jockey and if she is whether it is part of the riding agreement that on occasion she will be replaced by a more senior jockey. But how is Jamie Osborne, his owners or the betting public ever going to know if Nicola Currie can deliver when the chips are down if she is denied the opportunity?
It is all very well for Hayley to say that as her younger female colleagues gain race-riding experience they will eventually be given better quality horses to ride in better quality races but in her own long career how often has she been given those opportunities? Her win-to-loss ratio in Group 1’s must be better than any of the top male jockeys yet it is many years since she was last seen in a Group race of any kind. Hayley should have been the Bryony of flat racing. It is too late for her now. Let’s hope one of the others emulate on the flat what their counterparts are achieving over jumps.