IN ALL FAIRNESS - Record breaker Rachael

When something unique happens, it is sometimes hard to appreciate it at the time. This is what makes the word “history” so fascinating. People tend to think that if someone makes history or something is historic, it relates to something in a previous generation they might not have witnessed for themselves.

It is why when you hear stories of elderly people of Ukraine at the moment who also experienced World War II as youngsters, you get a sense of the déjà vu they are going through, and only in time will we know whether what we they are experiencing and what we are observing is World War III.

In a roundabout way I am coming back towards sport, and to the further success of our own Rachael Blackmore, who wrote another chapter at Cheltenham last week by becoming the first female rider to win the Gold Cup, the biggest national hunt race of them all.

After an historic 2021 which saw her become the first female jockey to win the most famous national hunt race in the world, the Aintree Grand National, one of the few things left for her to achieve in her relatively short career was to win the Gold Cup, and she didn’t hang about in doing that by guiding A Plus Tard to glory last Friday.

You could see it in her reaction afterwards that this victory tops the lot. It wasn’t just being the first female jockey to do so, and that shouldn’t be downplayed, but she has long moved on from seeing herself as being different to her male counterparts. She is the same as them, just another jockey trying to ride horses the best she can. And in her performance on A Plus Tard, she showed that he is arguably the best national hunt jockey in the world, male or female.

For all the success she enjoyed at Cheltenham in 2021 where she was leading jockey at the festival with six winners, no different than any great sportsperson, it is the defeats that tend to linger in the mind most. And one of those was A Plus Tard finishing runner-up to Minella Indo twelve months previous.

She understood the ride she gave the horse that day wasn’t good enough to win, but she learned the lessons and put them into practise last Friday. However, coming around the final turn and fifteen lengths behind Minella Indo, it looked a forlorn hope, particularly as she and A Plus Tard looked to be trapped behind a number of horses. But once a gap opened up, she exploded A Plus Tard through and coming to the last fence you knew if they jumped it safely, they would chase down Minella Indo and in the finish won the race so easily, it was hard to credit they were so far behind so close to the finish.

It wasn’t just winning the race, but the manner in which Rachael and A Plus Tard won it which makes the achievement even greater and when the story is told of the first female rider to win the Gold Cup, it will be as much about the class of the performance.

What makes the Rachael Blackmore story even more gratifying is that she is just an ordinary simple person. You still sense she finds the fame of what she has achieved a little uncomfortable, but she understands it comes with the territory, and is highly unlikely that it will ever go to her head.

It would have been completely understandable if after the exertions of Cheltenham and the high of the Gold Cup success on Friday, that she would take a few days off, but she showed her roundedness and retained her commitment to Mouse Morris to ride at Thurles last Saturday, the venue of her very first winner as an amateur in 2011. Not only that, it was her only ride at the meeting, but she still made it her business to be there, and she didn’t let the bigger than usual crowd at her local track down by claiming victory, aboard the aptly named Gentlemansgame, which Rachael, along with the likes of Nina Carberry and Katie Walsh, and Bryony Frost at the moment, they have and are proving that it is not just a mans game any more.

It’s incredible to think at the age of 32 what she has achieved, particularly in such a relatively short space of time as she only turned professional in 2015 and it is really only since 2017 when she won the conditional riders’ championship in Ireland that she began being courted by the biggest trainers in the country, particularly Henry de Bromhead whose stars as a jockey and trainer have risen side by side.

It is exciting to think of what might come next.