At the back of Aintree by a pigeon-racing club, a few locals asked for Rachael Blackmore’s autograph on Saturday night. In 1977, after Charlotte Brew’s achievement in being the first woman to ride in the Grand National, The Daily Mirror flew her to the US on Concorde with the boxing champion John Conteh. The first woman to win it is also flying high but seems happier ruffling feathers in more modest fashion.
Blackmore pushed racing into the spotlight on Saturday on Minella Times, but she would really be much happier if nobody ever pointed out that she was a woman. “I won’t be the last,” she said. “Ah look, I know it’s all part of it.” Last month, she became the first woman to win the Champion Hurdle at Cheltenham with Honeysuckle and said: “This was never even a dream. It is so far removed from what I thought could happen in my life.” This is two steps removed again. She is also second to Paul Townend in the Irish jockeys’ championship. Such feats rekindled Sid Waddell’s quote about the darts star Eric Bristow. “When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer. Bristow’s only 27.” Blackmore is only 31 in a sport of long careers.
Saturday felt seismic but not shocking. “The idol we should all have,” was how Lizzie Kelly described her. The now retired jockey once said the weighing room was a bit like Lord of the Flies as she stressed the need to show no weakness. Two years ago, Richard Johnson, the four-times champion jockey, told me a woman would succeed him one day. “I just can’t see why not — look at Badminton or show-jumping or dressage,” he said. “They are equal in all those disciplines and there’s no reason why they can’t be here.”
AP McCoy, the man who spent years frustrating Johnson, had thought it would be too hard but changed his mind when Blackmore left the Cheltenham Festival as the leading jockey. Not long ago Paul Nicholls, the leading trainer at Aintree and long-term backer of Bryony Frost, created a stir when he said that would not happen in his lifetime. After the Grand National, he added: “It’s great for racing. It’s positive publicity which is what we want.” And then Ted Walsh, the trainer of third-placed Any Second Now, gave another view in the 2019 film Jump Girls. “Men arse-lick a bit, women don’t. The real strong women say, ‘Go f**k yourself.’ ”
Blackmore is too polite for that and is no extrovert. Where someone like Frost was born into a racing family — her father Jimmy rode Little Polveir to victory in the 1989 Grand National — Blackmore’s parents are a dairy farmer and a teacher. She used to race against Townend when they were kids, her first win coming aged 13 in a pony race in which he also featured, but she wanted to be a vet and qualified in equine science. She did not bother to tell her parents about her graduation because she was off racing.
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It was a slow-burning, word-of-mouth ascent. Davy Russell, who preceded Blackmore as the Grand National winner after his two turns on Tiger Roll, recommended her to a cattle dealer/trainer called John “Shark” Hanlon. Blackmore won that ladies handicap hurdle in 2011, but she ended up being forced to ride horses nobody wanted. Last month, Hanlon told The Times: “I feared for her. She’s so brave. I remember her getting three crunching falls in one day.”
Becoming the first Irish woman to turn professional in three decades in 2015 was partly down to Hanlon wanting her to be safer.
Bravery and resilience are the bedrock of a successful racing career. Johnson would travel 80,000 miles a year, ride seven days a week in winter and estimate he would fall once every 15 rides. “I wouldn’t get in a car if you gave me those odds,” he said. Russell, the man who helped Blackmore at the very start, is on the way back from horrendous injuries that led to surgeons drilling bolts in his head. Frost was taken to hospital after being unseated by Yala Enki in the Grand National but Nicholls said she is stiff and sore but should be back next week.
Blackmore shrugs off the danger. The conditional riders’ title came in 2017 with 32 winners and before long the giants of Irish racing gave her chances, Michael O’Leary at Gigginstown and then Henry de Bromhead. In some ways she shares many similarities with Johnson. He harboured no ambition to be a crossover star and was happier at his home course of Ludlow, racking up the rides and grafting away for a gritty kind of glory. Nobody in Ireland rides more often than Blackmore, 516 this season and 615 two seasons ago. She may not be the last but she is unusual in having the talent, backers and respect of all. She was back in the saddle after the Grand National on Saturday when Nicholls’s daughter, Megan, won the final race. “I spoke to Rachael before I came out and she says she was shaking like a leaf,” she said. Where Blackmore looked to the likes of Katie Walsh and Nina Carberry, Nicholls and every female jockey will look at her and think anything is possible.
Blackmore lives with two jockeys, her long-term boyfriend Brian Hayes, and Patrick Mullins, son of Irish equine sage Willie. Mullins revealed that when they first started living together the men would go racing while she would often have no ride and would stay home and bake. If that sounds like a gender stereotype, Mullins said it did make her pull her hair out.
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Mullins circled Aintree for a while on Burrows Saint next to his house-mate on Saturday. “I was chatting to Rachael going past the stands and we were both very happy,” he said. If she was shaking afterwards she was clearly calm during the race. “From the second last I couldn’t go with her,” Mullins said. Nor could anyone. “An inspiration to male and female jockeys,” Walsh said. “She’s got it all,” McCoy added.
For a sport that spends most of the year in a niche, and still reeling from the scandal of Gordon Elliott, the trainer banned for sitting on a dead horse, Blackmore is a PR dream. If she has broken down barriers that have been splintering for years, it remains to be seen whether this reluctant star wants to blaze on through to the mainstream.
