Our columnist pays tribute to Rachael Blackmore following the news she has retired from the saddle.
Rachael Blackmore’s riding career is over.
It’s a phrase used so flippantly and so often in our profession, but we genuinely may never see the like again.
Groundbreaking hardly does justice to someone who didn’t only break the glass ceiling but shatter it into a thousand pieces.
The record books will show she was the first female jockey to win the Champion Hurdle, Gold Cup and Grand National. The first to be crowned leading rider at the Cheltenham Festival.
But she also cemented her position in the top tier of her generation, not once did connections ever feel even a glimmer of need to look elsewhere for the big rides. A reliable, safe pair of hands in the pressure cooker of the championship races, a rider with the knack of getting the instinctive, quick decisions right which are so often the difference between victory and defeat.
She was an inspiration, a trailblazer, and a bloody good jockey. One who retires on her own terms, at a time of her own choosing.
No bowing out when the spotlight might have been elsewhere on one of the major days of the spring. Quietly she exited stage left late on a sunny Monday afternoon.
Her retirement has long been rumoured and every big-race winner for the last couple of years has had us fleetingly wondering if that might indeed be it.
Now it is.
The glare of publicity has never been something she’s craved. Blackmore has been a wonderful ambassador for the sport in TV interviews and PR appearances, but didn't seem fully comfortable with the routine media duties, the demands that are placed on someone enjoying the level of success she did.
To go in this way, at this time, fits with everything we've come to know about her.
My own standout memory of Blackmore's time in the saddle came at Aintree back in the spring of 2021.
A Randox Grand National staged in Covid times, with no crowd and a scattering of people around the racecourse.
I was one of the fortunate few to be there and watching from the stands as an Irish armada set sail for home, you couldn’t help but be drawn to the green cap of the second JP McManus silks.
We’d become so accustomed to watching Blackmore in the big races, her body language in the saddle easy to read. It was clear she had a ton of horse underneath her.
She was in front over the last and the rest was inevitable. Six-and-a-half lengths clear at the line, she punched the air in delight and let out a scream of joy that carried all the way to the stands.
The only sound you could hear at Aintree as Minella Times won his Grand National and Rachael Blackmore made history, was the sheer ecstasy of the rider.
It was surreal.
Her partnership with Honeysuckle was the most enduring equine one of her career, the one with Henry De Bromhead the bedrock for everything she's achieved in the last six or seven years.
At 35, she’s said no more.
She leaves a sport very grateful for the memories, the positive headlines and stories that took racing onto the front pages and major news bulletins for all the right reasons at a time when it faced pressures from outside the parish and was forced to fight its corner harder than ever before.
And for the generations that follow, she has offered proof that anything is possible, whoever you are, if you have the skills, drive and application that Rachael Blackmore displayed throughout her career.
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