The hardest thing about writing about horse racing is writing about horse racing. To most people, one horse is no different to the next. They run in circles around big open fields, sometimes jumping over things and sometimes not, with little lads on their backs waving sticks. The commentator’s voice rises through the race, and when it’s over, there’s a brief pause to talk about how rich the bookmakers got.
Some of us love it. We’re suckers for the thrill of a close one, for the mental calculations everyone’s making as they jump the last, for the bottomless courage of the jockeys. Sometimes there’s money down, sometimes there isn’t. The race is run, the result is called, and a few minutes later, another one goes off somewhere else.
Out in the world, though, horse racing leaves virtually no footprint. It is an incorrigibly niche sport, a small slice of a small slice of life. Stop 100 people in the street and ask them to tell you the difference between a hurdle and a fence. Between Leopardstown and Punchestown. Between Paul Townend and Jack Kennedy. Whatever number you think will give you three correct answers, you can probably halve it.
So that’s the battle. Here’s this great sport, full of nuance and intrigue and derring-do and it’s completely lost on vast swathes of the sporting public. If they think about it at all, they think in terms of gambling and, let’s be honest, who wants to write about that world any more than they have to? Finding a way to make horse racing accessible and interesting to a broad audience is just a tough sell.
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Into that world walked Rachael Blackmore a decade ago. A godsend. A jockey who didn’t look like the rest of them. Who didn’t sound like the rest of them. Who didn’t have a famous family name. The first professional female jumps rider in Ireland for almost 30 years. She was a once-in-a-generation story, whether she liked it or not.
Famously, she did not. Very much did not, in fact. The first time I interviewed her, we met at Griffith College – she was coming up to Dublin one night a week to do a business degree. This was November 2015, a couple of months after she had ridden her first winner as a pro. She was polite and careful and wary and, despite all her efforts to the contrary, completely fascinating.
“It won’t be that big, will it?” she asked a few minutes into the chat. “Just a small little thing? I don’t want it too big. It’s not that big a story. Just leave it as a little column at the side. Neat and tidy.”
Even then, you got the overwhelming sense of her discomfort in the spotlight. She was borderline aggressive in her modesty. She was no fool and she understood why you were interested. But when it came right down to it, she had four winners in a professional career that was eight months old at that point. No other jockey in the weigh room with those sort of numbers had the outside world asking after them.
That was always part of her leeriness with the press. Her office was the weigh room and her co-workers were a rolling cast of a few dozen young men chasing the same dream. She had to face them every day in the hothouse of cut-throat sport. The only way she could feel comfortable was to rise through the ranks without getting special treatment from anyone. From the media most of all.
My father-in-law was an avid racing man. He died in early 2019, at the ripe old age of 85. Right up to the end, he would happily pass most afternoons with his paper open at the racing page and a 10-cent yankee scribbled on a betting slip beside it, just for the interest. He had seen everyone come and go in the game for decades.
It might have been 2017 or thereabouts when we were watching the racing one afternoon and a Blackmore horse beat one of his selections to the line. “A good jock,” he said in defeat, which was always his seal of approval. If you got a “good jock” out of Pat Doyle, then a good jock you were.
A few years later, on the morning of the 2021 Grand National, my then six-year-old daughter was handed the newspaper and asked did she wanted to pick a horse for the big race later that day. “Is Rachael Blackmore in this?” she asked. When told that she was, she looked through the card and found her name and we put €1 each way on Minella Times.
Somewhere in there is the story of one of the greatest assets horse racing will ever have. Someone who, despite her misgivings and protestations, was actually special. Who offered a way into the sport that was common to everyone from primary school kids to pensioners. And who did it all in her own careful, self-contained way in civilian life before unleashing a ferocious competitor when the tapes went up.
My favourite Blackmore ride wasn’t the Grand National or the Gold Cup or all those gorgeous days on Honeysuckle. It was on Allaho in the 2021 Ryanair Chase, where she bucked out and made all the running from the front. She set such a relentless gallop that six horses in behind her had to be pulled up. That was one more than the previous four Ryanairs combined.
The glorious swagger of that ride, the sheer unapologetic confidence Blackmore showed in dominating the race, was such a contrast to the person she presents to the world. To watch her express that side of her on the biggest stage and leave everyone in her dust was something genuinely moving to behold.
Her retirement this week is a happy story, sad as the sport is to see her go. She got to call her own way out, unscathed and unbowed, in her own time and on her own terms.
Nobody deserves it more.
