When Cathy Gannon won the apprentice jockey’s title 20 years ago, she received a letter out of the blue from Julie Krone, the American rider. Krone was nearing the end of a Hall of Fame career in which she would ride more than 3,700 winners, but like many pioneers in sport, she blazed a trail that was hard to follow. In the weighing rooms of the US, Krone’s monumental achievements collided with the gender imbalance without tipping the scales.
Krone had never met Gannon, but she wanted to acknowledge her breakthrough. In Ireland, no female rider had ever won the apprentice title on the Flat. In the jockey’s table that season there were four other female riders in the top 50, but they had ridden just a dozen winners between them and within five years none of them were still riding professionally. For women jockeys, those were the prohibitive odds.
Gannon rode 33 winners that year, five more than Seamie Heffernan, one less than Kevin Manning, sitting comfortably inside the top 10. Coverage of her achievement migrated from the racing pages to the news pages and within weeks Gannon was selected as the inaugural winner of the Irish Times Sportswoman of the Year. On the awards circuit that winter she was an essential guest.
Gannon was just 23 and already nearing a crossroads in her career. Talented apprentices are attractive to owners and trainers while they have a weight allowance, but Gannon rode out her claim the following season. At that point, every apprentice suffers a process of re-appraisement. Not formally, but unavoidably. How good are they without their claim? Are they still worth a shout? Being a young woman in a male-dominated environment didn’t make it easier.
Since her late teens Gannon had been based with John Oxx, one of the most successful trainers at the Curragh. He had been a generous boss, and without her claim she knew that he would still give her opportunities. But with other senior jockeys in the yard, he didn’t have enough horses to satisfy her ambition. Good outside rides dried up. From the pervious season her win-percentage rate collapsed in half.
“I said to Mr Oxx that I wanted to go to England,” Gannon says now. “I didn’t really want to go – I was hoping he would give me more rides. He said, in my best interests, he thought I should go. I cried on the boat going over.
“I did struggle when I went over there. I wasn’t getting many rides. I was driving three or four hours for one ride. The diesel was costing me more than my riding fee. I was riding for Kevin Ryan when I went over first. They took me in as family and were really good to me.
“But then I got offered this job [in Wales]. I said I’d take it because nobody wanted to ride these horses. They weren’t good rides. They didn’t behave very well. Nobody would commit to them. I lived in a caravan for six months, in the middle of nowhere.”
Gannon came home for a while to draw breath. It was much too soon to give up. Anyway, give up for what? She left school at 14, by mutual consent. By then her behaviour had pushed her to the margins of school life, and she was restricted to one hour a day in class.
“I had trouble all through my school time. I saw psychologists and I got brain scans. They thought I was mad. I was just hyperactive. I probably had ADHD, but I wasn’t diagnosed at the time.
“I used to ride my pony down to the school bareback [in Donaghmede, on Dublin’s northside], tie him up and ride him back after I finished. I used to go back down then and wait for my friends. I had a meeting with the school when I was 14. If I didn’t get into the racing apprentice school, I was going to get kicked out. Deirdre Shiels, a teacher there, got me into Race. By the blessing of God then I was sent to John Oxx’s [from Race] because I don’t know where I’d be if I wasn’t. He was like a father-figure. Him and Mrs Oxx, they cared for people.”
At times Gannon tested his patience. Once she got into a row with one of the other apprentices, put down her tack in a fit of temper and stormed out. The flare-up happened on a Saturday, the busiest day in every yard. Oxx told her not to come back for two weeks.
“I rang him on the Sunday because I couldn’t tell me Ma. I was back in on the Monday. I was always arguing with the apprentices. They were always wanting to get races in front of me and trying to get me in trouble all the time,” she says.
By the time she cut the cord, Gannon had spent eight years with Oxx. To launch her career in England, that was the kind of stability she needed. In David Evans’ yard she found it.
In racing, winning has a viral quality. Trainers want jockeys who are riding with confidence, but without the right horses there is no way of being noticed. When Gannon went to England first, she was living a hand-to-mouth existence on a diet of long-shots. At Evans’ yard, she was given winning chances, and she flourished.
Year-on-year, her tally of winners climbed: 22, 48, 60, 71. Three times in the space of six seasons she was named Female Jockey of the Year at the Lesters, the racing industry awards in the UK. In her best seasons, Gannon’s numbers were comparable with Hayley Turner, who had been a trailblazer for women jockeys.
“You need a strong mind [to be a jockey],” says Gannon. “You need good mental health. It’s tough. It’s a hard world. There’s ups and downs and you have to be able to take the good with the bad. There’s a lot of competition and being a girl as well is a little bit difficult. But I loved it. It was great craic in the weighing room and that. I didn’t have too many friends outside of racing because I was just too busy. It’s a different way of life.”
But even when Gannon was successful and established, she was dealing with prejudice. She tells a story of a trainer walking in the weigh room at Southwell one day looking for someone to ride his horse. One of the valets said that Gannon was available, but the trainer continued with his search and only returned to Gannon when everyone else had said no. “‘Here,’ I said, ‘if I wasn’t good enough to ride your horse first time around, I’m certainly not good enough 32nd time around.’”
Gannon was talented and unflinching and the racing media in the UK loved her because she was feisty and quotable. She complained on social media once about the deplorable quality of food for jockeys at Newbury, one of the elite racecourses in the UK, and her intervention caused a stir. The Jockey Club fined her £290 (€350) for some breach or other but the other jockeys had a whip round to pay the fine, and she says even the manager of Newbury chipped in. The food improved. It had been a problem for ages, but nobody else had the guts to speak up.
Courage was part of her make-up. For jumps jockeys, falls are a daily hazard, but Gannon suffered far more injuries than a Flat jockey would budget for. Over the years she has broken her back, her femur, her jaw, two collar bones. Her shoulders have been in the wars so often that she has no cartilage left in either joint and she needed three injections a year just to keep going.
Three years before Gannon finally retired, the medical advice was that she should quit. She carried on. In time she will need shoulder replacements. It was a gruelling catalogue of setbacks and comebacks. After one collarbone fracture she returned to the saddle after just 11 days, “pumped to the gills with codeine”.
“Every winter I seemed to get a fall and it’s the mental torture when you’re out,” Gannon says. “It’s not the pain of any injury. As soon as you get a fall it’s not even the pain, it’s ‘How long am I going to be out?’ It’s the mental torture of being out and people getting your rides. When you get back after an injury you have to work so hard to get back to where you were.”
In 2015 her son Aaron was born, and within a year Gannon’s career as a race rider was over. She had just ridden a winner at Lingfield in May 2016 when her next mount acted up in the stalls and her foot was crushed.
“I was told it was a bad ride but I said, ‘I’ll be all right.’ It just reared up in the stalls. Nine times out of 10 you bang your foot coming out of the stalls [and nothing happens]. Half of my foot was detached from the other half, near enough, and my five toes were broken. And here’s me, booking rides. I was saying, ‘it doesn’t look great,’ but I was icing it, thinking I might be able to get back. Then the hospital rang. Nine out of 10 footballers don’t get back from that injury.”
Gannon returned to Ireland and John Oxx welcomed her back as a work rider. But her foot broke again. “Sure, that was that.” She was 34.
Horses are still part of Gannon’s life. She was a jockey coach for a while, and she works now in Yeomanstown Stud, getting horses ready for the breeze-up sales.
No woman rider has been apprentice champion in Ireland since Gannon. Nobody has come close. She beat the odds.
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