will there be a rachael blackmore legacy?

-​Let’s be clear; Rachael Blackmore is fully deserving of the tribute and praise she received in today’s edition of the Racing Post. The best part of nine pages may verge on overkill but then it was better reading than the kicks-up-the-arse racing enthusiasts had to contend with pre-Cheltenham, mentioning no names, of course.
Anyone who has read 1% of my drivel since I started with this website will know I am a fully paid-up member of the female-riders support group. In fact, I have blown the trumpet on their behalf since before the Racing Post was founded, so to read, more eloquently and professionally put than anything I could hope to achieve, column after column declaring Blackmore’s Grand National triumph as the start of something big rather made me wince a wee bit. If to a man they had picked-up on my trumpet-blowing a decade back it might not have taken 43-years for a female to win one of jumping’s classic horseraces. That, by the way, is me blowing a trumpet on behalf of myself. A female riding the Grand National winner is, after all, the best good news racing could ever hope to achieve. I said it twenty years ago, chaps, comforting of you to catch up!
Racheal Blackmore is a rare talent but to claim she has changed racing on her own and forever is a big statement in need of qualification. For the face of racing to have been changed forever there has to be a legacy, a Rachael Blackmore legacy, and racing history suggests it will not happen.
Remember when Hayley Turner won 2 Group 1’s, plus the Grade 1 Beverley D in the U.S.? That was a defining moment, a female finally breaking into the top table of male dominated jockeys. Not only did no female follow in her wake but Hayley’s career hardly altered either. Hayley was exactly what flat racing needed: she is a bouncy, cheery soul who no one could dislike and the camera and the public are particularly fond of her. Yet Royal Ascot and Shergar Cup aside, she remains a journeyman jockey.
Big things were predicted for Josephine Gordon yet for whatever reason she too has failed to rise above ‘journeyman’ status. It is only to be hoped that the success Holly Doyle has carved out for herself over the past eighteen-months leads to her being given opportunities on good horses in the classics and Group 1’s.
What I find a little galling is that Blackmore is being credited alone for this resurgent faith in the female jockey. Bryony Frost may be unorthodox in both her riding skills and I suspect in her personality but she made the initial breakthrough when winning the Ryanair and when she won this season’s King George at Kempton on Boxing Day the fact that it was the biggest race in British and Irish racing history won by a female rider went largely if not entirely unheralded. Of course, in winning the Champion Hurdle Blackmore topped Bryony’s achievement and in winning the Grand National she dominates the sport like no since A.P.McCoy.
But for there to be a legacy, for Blackmore to have truly ‘changed the face of horse racing forever’, owners and trainer have to play their part. I suspect what will happen is what happened in the years after Hayley won her Group 1’s. Nothing. There is a good crop of female riders in the British conditional ranks at present, any one of which is deserving of the opportunity to follow in Blackmore’s footsteps. Of course, what is being denied them is the opportunity to fail, which one or all them might, but they must be given the opportunity to fail otherwise without opportunity we, and they, will never know how good they could be.
Before Blackmore, and perhaps they were her inspiration, the top two amateur riders were Katie Walsh and Nina Carberry, neither of whom turned professional because they did not think they would get enough rides to make the game pay. Also, as good as they were, how many Gold Cups, Champion Chases or Champion Hurdles did either ride in? Nil, is that the answer? No trainer thought either would be an asset in any race above a handicap and that’s the cold truth. And that’s a Walsh and a Carberry we are talking about. So, what hope has any female rider apart from Blackmore come next March or any March in the future? And in Ireland at this present moment there is no female, amateur or professional, to prosper from her success.
Rachael Blackmore is no spring chicken; she is thirty-one, even if she rides until she is forty we will only be blessed by her presence for another nine-years, in that time can you see any of the current crop of female riders being given the opportunities afforded to Blackmore? Bryony Frost has won a Ryanair, a King George and countless other big races, and yes, her riding style is unorthodox and she can talk the hind-leg off a donkey, but has anyone outside of Paul Nicholls given her rides in good races? And she is the only other female National Hunt jockey who can be listed on the same page as Blackmore.
I do not pretend to know the answer to the question I am asking. Owners and trainers cannot be forced to put up female jockeys and certainly not in the races that matter. But for Blackmore and last Saturday to truly impact on the future of this great sport there simply has to be a Blackmore legacy otherwise horse racing will revert to being a male-dominated affair.