IN ALL FAIRNESS - Blackmore is leaping barriers
It was certainly a sporting weekend for Mná na hÉireann!
From Rachael Blackmore’s historic victory in the Aintree Grand National, to Orla O’Dwyer helping the Brislane Lions to reach to the Women’s Aussie Rules Grand Final, to the Irish rugby teams impressive start to the Six Nations, it was positivity all round. On top of that you had the Republic of Ireland ladies football team in friendly action while the weekend before Leona McGuire produced her best performance so far in a lady’s golf major.
Media coverage of women’s sport has been growing steadily, but it still trails in the halfpenny place to men, however, weekends like this will do more to make sport more appealing to girls, both young and not so young.
While it will take time for the Covid impact on sport to be fully quantified, it is highly likely it will have had a disproportionate impact on girls, considering the fallout rate among teenage girls across all sports was considerably higher than that of boys in any case, and with the majority of sporting activities having been shut down for much of the past year, there will be a lot of work to be done to get that group of girls back into sport in whatever disciplines they were in.
Being optimistic, you would hope when the sporting pitches of Ireland are reopened to under 18’s from Monday week that there will be a flood of girls, as well as boys, back into activity having been denied structured physical exercise for the last six months. Hence, this is a massive opportunity for clubs and sporting bodies to make sport more appealing for young girls and put them on track to be the next Rachael Blackmore, Orla O’Dwyer or Dorothy Wall.
While the whole country basked in the glow of Rachael Blackmore becoming the first woman to ride the winner of the Aintree Grand National, we here in Tipperary can take an extra element of pride in that she is one of our own. Over the past month, the Killenaule rider has broken barrier after barrier in the sport by riding a classic winner at the Cheltenham Festival in the form of Honeysuckle in the Champion Hurdle, to being the leading rider at the festival, and crowning it by becoming the first female to win the Aintree Grand National in the 182 years of the most famous horse race in the world.
While it is right and proper to herald her achievements of recent weeks, hopefully it will be a case of female success going forward being normalised with their sporting achievements seen in the same vein as their male counterparts. Horse Racing is one of the few sports where being a man or a woman should be immaterial as it should all come down to horsemanship and at the moment Rachael is showing that she is as good as there is. The aim now is to get more to be as good after she followed in the saddle from Katie Walsh, Nina Carberry, and Jane Mangan, and took it to another level altogether.
Motorsport is another sporting activity where being a man or a woman shouldn’t make a material difference when it comes to driving a car, but we have seen very few of them breaking into the upper echelons of race driving, apart from Danica Patrick in the United States, with Roscrea’s Nicole Drought giving it a good go in her own right here in Ireland and the UK at the moment.
However, what women need to succeed first and foremost is a chance and that is what Rachael Blackmore got, particularly through the likes of trainer Henry de Bromhead who didn’t see her as a female, he saw her as a top-class jockey and wasn’t deterred from giving her his top horses and he in turn has been handsomely rewarded as the Blackmore and de Bromhead combo will now go hand in hand when the history books are updated in the years to come.