'She's got bigger balls than any of the boys' - the making of Rachael Blackmore

This article was first published on March 27, 2021

Ruby Walsh is reminded of that moment in 2008 when his stomach turned as he realised Denman had Kauto Star’s measure in the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

Walsh already had two wins that day and the leading riders’ title in his grasp. Scripture held that a little slice of history was there for the taking, but Sam Thomas and Denman wouldn’t bend the knee. All that went before was no consolation.

For Walsh in 2008, read Rachael Blackmore in 2021. Untouchable in the Cotswolds all week, she floated down to the Gold Cup start on A Plus Tard, an aura of invincibility about her. She’d farmed six wins – a figure topped only by Walsh – and had become the first female jockey to win a championship race at the festival with that epic Champion Hurdle rout on Honeysuckle. The fairytale had it that the Gold Cup would be a glorious crescendo to this wondrous fantasy.

Then Prestbury Park reasserted its authority, like only it can. Minella Indo, who was hers for the taking as Denman had been for Walsh, wasn’t going to stand on ceremony under Jack Kennedy.

Despite all that had gone before, Blackmore's tinted goggles couldn’t hide the ruin on her face as she collapsed into the saddle and cursed the skies.

“Look at her body language when she goes by the line,” Walsh says in respect of her utter dejection. “No matter what had happened before, that hurt. I know what that feels like. It’s that grit, that determination and hunger, that I admire the most about her. She is a winner.”

A crestfallen Rachael Blackmore curses the skies on A Plus Tard as Paul Townend congratulates Jack Kennedy following his Gold Cup victory on Minella IndoCredit: Michael Steele (Getty Images)

Blackmore was crestfallen. She isn’t here to take part. The parameters of her ambition have been recalibrated by one ground-breaking milestone after another and she is at the very apex of her profession. At every remove, that ascent has been grounded in actions.

“This was never even a dream for me, it was so far from what I thought can happen in my life,” she said atop Honeysuckle after dismantling her Champion Hurdle rivals. “Maybe there is a lesson in that for everyone out there.”

This never being an ambition is something she often repeats. She never dreamed big and never talked big. Instead, she focused all her energy on doing and learning. That’s the lesson she wanted to impart. No concessions, no limits. Just endeavour.

• 'I feel so incredibly lucky to have had the career I’ve had' - groundbreaking jockey Rachael Blackmore announces her retirement 

• Rachael Blackmore's career is evidence that there's no such thing as an impossible dream 

• 'Everybody wants to be the next Rachael Blackmore' - racing heavyweights pay tribute to record-breaking jockey 

The best boy on the team

In the Jump Girls documentary that was broadcast on TG4 in 2019, there is a beautifully grainy clip of a 15-year-old Blackmore repelling Paul Townend in a driving finish at Clashmealcon races in a stubble field in north Kerry in 2004.

It was her second outing on her pony Tommy. Townend was just 13 and promptly graduated from pony racing tyro to track sensation. Blackmore took the scenic route.

In racing terms, she would prove the opposite of precocious, but she understood what it meant to win from a young age.

She grew up on her parents’ dairy farm in Killenaule, County Tipperary. Her father Charles and mother Eimir, an English teacher, both rode horses and hunted, as did Blackmore, who went on to compete successfully on the Tipperary Pony Club team.

“Rachael was the only girl on the team, and they used to refer to her as the best boy on the team,” remembers Eimir with a chuckle.

“We always knew she was very keen, and she was very adventurous. She was on the Tipperary Pony Club games team that won twice in the RDS. They had a lot of success, so she was competitive, there is no doubt about that, and she has a fantastic work ethic.”

Blackmore was soon gravitating towards the racing world, although she earned an equine science degree and a diploma in business studies as she went.

All the while she was dipping her toe in point-to-point waters, often the mercenary who would ride the horses no-one else would.

There wasn’t much glamour in that, but then opportunity knocked. A ‘Shark’ sensed something stirring in the water that no-one else spotted.

Making an impression in the paid ranks

John ‘Shark’ Hanlon had Stowaway Pearl entered in a lady riders' handicap hurdle at Thurles in February 2011, but he had no lady rider.

John 'Shark' Hanlon, who gave Blackmore her big break on the track and supported her all the way through the ranksCredit: Edward Whitaker

Davy Russell recommended one he had been impressed by when riding out at Pat Doyle’s yard. Hanlon duly went with Blackmore and then kept coming back for more.

“That first day she rode for me, the boys that owned Stowaway Pearl were from Thurles, and we wanted to have a few quid on the horse,” he recalls. “I didn’t want to spook Rachael, so I didn’t say anything to her about it, just that, when she turned in, to go for home and stay going. Sure she turned in and went 20 lengths clear and it was all over.”

A month later, Hanlon sent a five-year-old called Soudain to Horse and Jockey for his debut. He also won for Blackmore and Hanlon got his horse away for £54,000. He’d sold his commodity and was investing in a different unpolished diamond.

Still, Blackmore's progress as an amateur was fitful. She was nine stone wet through, and Hanlon decided he was missing a trick in not utilising the firepower at his disposal to claim 7lb against the professionals.

At 25 years of age, Blackmore heeded his advice. On St Patrick’s Day, 2015 at Down Royal, she became the first female jump jockey to ride as a professional in Ireland since Maria Cullen a quarter of a century earlier when she partnered Redwood Boy into fifth.

By then, she hadn’t ridden a winner on the track for six months, but she felt she had nothing to lose. While it would be another six months before she was rewarded with a success in the paid ranks, the discipline and commitment required to make progress suited her.

Hanlon recalls: “I said to her, ‘Give it six months, and if you’re not happy then we can go back to the drawing board.’ I know she got a lot of calls and texts from people telling her she was mad, but I thought it was the right thing to do and she stuck at it.”

The duo combined to score with Most Honourable at Clonmel that September. Slowly, things began to fall into place as she built more relationships and honed her craft.

Around the same time, a young trainer called Denise O’Shea was also starting out in east Cork. In the summer of 2016, they hit it off with a couple of cracking money-spinners in Supreme Vinnie and Oisin James.

“I didn’t know Rachael before she rode for me,” O’Shea recalls. “It was Christmas 2015, and I had Oisin James going to Limerick, so Rachael’s agent Gary Cribbin rang me and suggested her. I said we’d go with her, and about an hour later this new number came up on my phone. It was Rachael. She wanted to come down and sit on the horse. Maybe that’s the sort of thing that happens in bigger yards, but it’s not the sort of thing that happens to a small outfit like mine.

Former First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond presents a trophy to Denise O'Shea, with Blackmore on the right, after Supreme Vinnie had won at Gowran Park in 2016Credit: Patrick McCann

“At the time, Rachael was off on a Monday so she started coming down regularly, and she was always so professional. She’d go anywhere early of a morning to meet you and she’d stay as long as you wanted or ride anything you wanted, and her feedback was great.

"By turning professional, she knew she’d have to work ten times harder to get where she wanted to be. She always had the talent, but you have to put in the work and she did that. From the day she came into the yard, you could see a determination about her.”

Blackmore was making an impression. She finished her first full campaign with six winners, all the while getting stronger, tidier and more confident.

“And she was always a bad loser,” Hanlon says. “She might never say a word, but she is very tough on herself when something gets beaten.”

The following season, with Hanlon, O’Shea and another fledgling alliance with Ellmarie Holden conspiring to unearth an aggregate 22 winners, Blackmore surged to the conditional riders’ title with a final haul of 32 at 27 years of age.

That was another unprecedented landmark for a female jump jockey in Ireland, although her objection to the focus on gender was now becoming apparent, for all that the ground-breaking nature of her achievements made such observations unavoidable.

“People supported her early on, and they would have had to think outside the box to give her that chance,” her mother says. “But they must have seen something in her to do so.”

In one of the most physically demanding and punishing sporting pursuits, with no privileged leg-up, Blackmore wasn’t just holding her own against the boys anymore, she was excelling.

Katie Walsh, who along with Nina Carberry had hastened the transformation in perceptions of female jump jockeys, has always insisted the proportional gender imbalance is as much to do with choice as a lack of opportunity. She maintains that girls are generally just less inclined to pursue such a gruelling profession, and points to Blackmore’s resilience as one of the traits that sets her apart.

Katie Walsh: 'I know I wouldn’t have been able to take some of the falls she has – I just wouldn’t'Credit: Edward Whitaker

“Rachael gets some awful falls but she bounces back up and dusts herself off,” Walsh says. “I know I wouldn’t have been able to take some of the falls she has – I just wouldn’t.”

In 2017-2018, Blackmore consolidated her progress with another 34 wins.

She had also started riding a few for Mouse Morris, whose ageing First Lieutenant proved a gateway to some more high-profile partners.

The hero Gotham needs right now

At Navan on March 4, 2017, Blackmore rode her first winner in the ubiquitous Gigginstown House Stud colours on Folsom Blue. Eddie and Michael O’Leary’s firm is synonymous with being a fairly ruthless, results-driven enterprise, so their seal of approval carried real clout.

“With Rachael, it didn’t matter what sex she was,” says Eddie O’Leary. “She is like Ruby in that she'd know what everyone else in a race is doing, horses run and jump for her, and falls never bothered her. She is always going forward on a horse, never sitting against them, and that’s bottle. Never mind her tactical awareness or strength, she has bigger balls than any of the boys.”

O’Leary soon moved to convert Henry de Bromhead. At the time, De Bromhead was deploying those he deemed the best available, and Blackmore wasn’t on his radar.

When he and O’Leary shared a taxi to Aintree after touching down in Liverpool three years ago, O’Leary ran the idea up the flagpole.

“Henry has always had a reputation for being a bit tough on jockeys, and I said to him that this might suit him because he might be a bit slower to let fly,” O’Leary guffaws. He is only half-joking.

De Bromhead admits the suggestion came out of leftfield. “She wasn’t foremost in my mind,” he says. “But Eddie pointed out how hard she had worked to get to where she was. I went home and digested it, and we didn’t jump into it straight away.

“She rode Gangster for us at Kilbeggan at the end of April, and I went into it with an open mind, but I wasn’t committing to anything, definitely not. I was happy to give it a go at that time of year, and then she just started winning on everything. All of a sudden, I was committed to her.”

The dream team. Henry de Bromhead and Rachael Blackmore take a moment at CheltenhamCredit: Tim Goode (Getty Images)

Having won De Bromhead’s support, Blackmore surged to a final tally of 90 domestic winners that season, eventually losing out to Townend after a sustained run at the jockeys’ championship. She guided A Plus Tard and Minella Indo to a memorable brace in the Cotswolds, and all of a sudden she was lighting up Broadway.

“I always say I never gave her our job,” De Bromhead insists. “She just rode herself into the position she is in now. She is the full package and just keeps winning races. That’s what it comes down to, and she was almost fully formed by the time she got to me.

"That's her own doing, and the people who supported her on the way up. I was lucky to be able to jump on the bandwagon a little later.”

And what of that reputation of his for being hard on his jockeys – did she meet fire with fire?

“She is well able to make her point,” he suggests. “I think as we’ve evolved, if I say something in the heat of the moment – and I do wear my heart on my sleeve – she knows I wouldn’t dwell on it and for us both to move on.

“I would hope I'm getting more mellow with age, but it comes down to having the confidence in her at this stage. Like, at Cheltenham last year we’d have been in deep discussion about what we were going to do. Now, she just tells me what she is going to do and that’s it.

“With Honeysuckle, I’d be used to seeing her sitting second or third, but there she was in fifth or sixth passing the stands at Cheltenham. I was thinking, that’s not normal, but I was very comfortable seeing her there, and I would usually be nervous watching races.”

That conviction was writ large all week, when Blackmore was catapulted from Broadway to the billboards of Hollywood. Granted, her indifference to the microphone means she isn’t necessarily the ebullient poster girl some would like her to be for the sport.

In that sense, the 31-year-old might not be the hero Gotham wants. What she is, though, is the hero Gotham needs.

A blockbuster A-lister earning the world’s attention on merit, breathing down Townend’s neck once more as she vies to avenge that 2019 title defeat. With 85 wins, she is seven adrift and a maiden century is in sight.

Evolving into the finished article

At Cheltenham, it felt like Blackmore’s evolution into the finished article was complete, and you need only look back 12 months to see how she fine-tuned aspects of her riding. In the white heat of that arena, belief and composure are at a premium.

In 2020, Honeysuckle lost her position in the Mares’ Hurdle and needed the bounce of the ball when Robbie Power and Townend invited her up the inside turning in. Monalee was always doing a bit much behind Bristol De Mai in the Gold Cup and then got bullied out of it by Santini at the top of the hill before running on late, and Minella Indo hesitated at the final fence before being caught by Champ.

None of that is to suggest they should have won, but last week Blackmore went about making up her mounts' minds for them, including twice for Willie Mullins on Allaho and Sir Gerhard.

“Every experience in life is a lesson, and I’d say she left last year’s festival after learning a good few lessons,” Ruby Walsh muses. “When she went to the last on Minella Indo last year, she let him pop; this time, Honeysuckle was home and hosed but she still rode her to the last.

“Nico de Boinville put her in a pocket at the top of the hill in the Gold Cup a year ago; this time, she was putting Paul Townend in pockets. That’s what it’s all about.

Eddie O'Leary, Rachael Blackmore and Henry de Bromhead go through the debrief after Notebook's Arkle Chase win at Leopardstown in 2020Credit: Caroline Norris

“Most people only see the finish, but 95 per cent of races are won and lost long before you turn in. Rachael had her races won early last week. Watch Bob Olinger. After a furlong she went forward, and on Sir Gerhard it was she who went on because she recognised no one else would."

O’Leary agrees that her performance is off the chart right now, highlighting her ruthless instinct when she has her rivals where she wants them.

“People are only waking up to her now, but she is a very special talent," he says.

"Tactically she has come on so much. Paul Townend got the brunt of it at Cheltenham when she locked him up a few times, and that is because she is now so aware of what is going on around her. She is the real deal, and the secret is out now. The world knows how good she is.”

The world does, and, deep down, the unfailingly modest Blackmore might be beginning to accept it as well. Eight years ago, in a little clip produced by the point-to-point community to promote women in the sector, she was asked about her career path.

“I could see myself working with horses, but, in relation to riding, I mean everyone kind of runs out at some stage,” Blackmore said. “You have to be really good to last the time.”

She’s still going. She must be really good.

More to read:

'I feel so incredibly lucky to have had the career I’ve had' - groundbreaking jockey Rachael Blackmore announces her retirement 

Rachael Blackmore's career is evidence that there's no such thing as an impossible dream 

'Everybody wants to be the next Rachael Blackmore' - racing heavyweights pay tribute to record-breaking jockey 

The Front Runner is our unmissable email newsletter available exclusively to Racing Post+ subscribers. Chris Cook provides his take on the day's biggest stories and tips for the upcoming racing every morning from Monday to Friday. Not a Racing Post+ subscriber? Join today and also receive our Ultimate Daily emails plus our full range of fantastic website and newspaper content.