Hayley Turner would like a helicopter. “I still love the riding, that hasn’t changed at all,” she said at Chelmsford City on Thursday evening, a few minutes after a winner and three days after announcing that she will retire at the end of the Flat season. “It’s just the lifestyle that goes with it, really. If I had a helicopter, I could quite happily carry on. Or the favourite for next year’s Guineas. Then I’d stay, definitely. I’d be stupid not to. So I’m after a horse with Classic-winning potential, and a helicopter and pilot that I can use every day.”
Turner knows well that the chance of the former is negligible, and of the latter, inconceivable. As a result, the most successful female rider that British racing has seen will be an ex-jockey in a couple of months’ time.
She was the first woman to win a Group One race outright, aboard Dream Ahead in the 2011 July Cup, and added another six weeks later when Margot Did took the Nunthorpe at York. The following summer she steered I’m A Dreamer to victory in the Grade One Beverley D Stakes at Arlington Park in Chicago. Three years later, she is walking away at the age of just 32.
Rides like Turner’s win on Castle Combe on Thursday evening make her decision seem even more of a puzzle. It is true that the race unfolded well from Turner’s point of view, as Castle Combe likes to settle off a strong gallop and there was plenty of pace up front.
Good jockeys make the most of every opportunity, however, and Turner is one of the best. She anchored Castle Combe in last place for much of the one-and-three-quarter miles, then passed every opponent in the straight. The final flourish was to steer between two opponents, through a gap some riders might have swerved. It was cool, ruthless and precise.
On Sunday, the day before her announcing her retirement, Turner rode a winner at an international jockeys’ challenge in Japan. Last month, she was part of the successful “Girls” team in the Shergar Cup at Ascot. Yet she has had just seven rides, and no winners, in Group events since the start of 2014. It is not enough to keep the hunger alive.
“It’s the travelling, and it’s also seven days a week, more or less,” she says. “You get the odd Sunday off, but you’re up early to ride out and when you get a day off, you’re exhausted.
“It’s not really an age thing at all, but when I was younger I could go through it because I was hungry and on adrenaline, and you don’t realise because you love it so much. When it starts to become a job, it’s actually really tough.
“It’s not like I’m Frankie Dettori or William Buick, who can pick and choose a little bit. They’ve got good retainers and can have a week off and come back, but I’ve always found that my career has gone as well as it has because of momentum and grinding it out and going for it. I wouldn’t be able to go off for three months and then come back and expect to do well, and also I don’t benefit fitness-wise doing that. I find it takes me longer to get fit.
“At the moment I’ve been on the go last year and all this year without a proper holiday and I feel like I’m really fit and riding well. I had a bad year last year because I had a bad fall [at Doncaster in September 2013] and I lost my confidence, but I feel now that it’s back and I’m riding better than I ever have. Last year I only had 40 winners and I thought that was good considering how I was riding. This year I’m on 40 already and I think next year if people realised I’m back to how I was, they’d use me again.
“It’s just that I’ve done it before. It’s a rollercoaster, up and down, but I feel ready to do something different. I’m hungry for a new challenge, to be honest. It’s a job that I’ve done for such a long time, I’ve had winners at all the tracks and in different countries. I could stay out there and maybe I would ride more Group One winners, but I feel like doing something different.”
Turner is adamant that being a woman in what remains a male-dominated profession has made no difference to the opportunities available to her. Along with the travelling, she will not miss being asked about it.
“I’ve had 40 winners already this season and I could go on and pick it up again next year,” she says. “I get the chances. A lot of the lads would want to be in my position.
“Trainers and owners want a good jockey on their horses and if you’re good enough, they want to use you. It’s nothing to do with being a girl, the numbers are higher for men because men are better riders than women in general. A lot of the girls that try aren’t good enough.
“Every interview I do, it’s just all about this. It’s just like - bore off. I’ve never used that card, and I never will.
“I work as hard as they do, they work as hard as I do if not harder sometimes. I can still do it, but I’ve not got the ambition as much now as I used to, and you can’t do it without that.
“It’s not a job, it’s a lifestyle. Your whole world is racing, everything’s racing. It’s been fantastic but it’s a big world out there and there’s other stuff I want to do. I don’t just want to be a jockey.”
In addition to being the first female jockey to ride a Group One winner outright, following Alex Greaves’s dead-heat on Ya Malak in the 1997 Nunthorpe, Turner was also the first woman to ride 100 winners in a calendar year on the Flat, in 2008. It was enough to put her among the top 10 riders that year, while she was in the top 20 in both 2011 and 2012.
Her July Cup victory, meanwhile, was widely seen as a milestone for female jockeys, one that might help to stamp out the lingering bias against them among trainers and owners. Three years later, though, the only woman in the top 50 of the title race is the apprentice Sammy Jo Bell, who scrapes in with nothing to spare. Cathy Gannon – who has missed a significant part of the campaign with injury – and Rachel Richardson are 56th and 53rd respectively, while Turner, with 18 winners in the new, truncated championship format, is 61st.
It is a dauntingly male-dominated list for a young woman apprentice at the start of her career, but Josephine Gordon, who had one ride at Chelmsford City on Thursday, remains keen to rise to the challenge.
“It is a hard industry and it’s whether you’re tough enough to cope with it really,” Gordon said. “It isn’t about sex, and it shouldn’t be about sex.
“It is a rough game. Maybe they [owners and trainers] look at girls and think they’re slightly softer, but I don’t think it’s as bad as it used to be. It’s a lot better, and it is only going to get a lot better for us.”
Like many in racing, Gordon was surprised that Turner had decided to retire in her early 30s. “It was a bit of a shock,” she said. “Hayley is pretty much the idol of all the girls, everyone wants to follow in her footsteps. There’s Sammy Jo Bell at the moment, and hopefully a few more to follow. My ambition to start with was just to be a jockey and get my licence, and then from there, work to be as good as I can possibly be and prove myself.
“I think it’s a hard game for everyone. I do think there’s a lot more girls around nowadays, and a lot more chances for girls, but male or female, it’s hard.”
Richard Perham, a former jockey and now the senior tutor for prospective jockeys at the British Racing School in Newmarket, has seen a steady rise in the number of young women training to be riders in recent years, on the Flat at least.
“When you look at the foundation training [for stable staff], that will be probably 70% female,” Perham says. “When they come to me on a jockeys’ course, when it comes to the conditionals [prospective jump jockeys] it’s still heavily in favour of lads. But when you look at the apprentices [for the Flat], over the last few years there’s been a real change.
“About two years ago was the first time since I started here in 2005 that there were more girls on the apprentice licence course than boys. It is a turnaround, and you’ll see far more really, really good women riding in races. The trend is definitely changing.”
Perham feels that a lack of opportunities is a problem for all young jockeys, male or female, but also that prejudice against women riders remains deeply ingrained in some part of the industry.
“A big problem here is that some people are still living in the Dark Ages,” he says. “There are lots of trainers that are willing to give anyone an opportunity, and train young riders and help them out, but there are also trainers and owners that wouldn’t entertain girls riding, and that’s sad in this day and age.
“In America, from the day that they ride their fifth winner, they have one year to lose their claim. They go down to 5lb, but they ride for a whole year with that claim regardless of winners. What that does is allow the really strong, talented jockeys to come to the front and make a career from race-riding. The girls that get rides in America will suddenly fly. Over here, there aren’t as many opportunities.
“Sophie Doyle [the sister of leading jockey James] is a great example. She always looked like she was going to succeed but it never really took off here and she rode about 30 winners in her best year. She’s upped sticks and gone to America, and she’s ridden 55 winners this year.
“She’s not at the big meets, but she’s riding plenty of winners and there are lots of female riders on the American circuit who are given far more of an equal footing than they are within the British industry. They are accepted as AN Other jockey, and the riders here are the same, they don’t want any gimmes, they want to be treated exactly the same.”
Turner has no firm ideas about what her future might hold outside the weighing room, though she has agreed to do some work for At The Races television, and does not rule out a return to race-riding at some stage.
“I’m going to enjoy every minute of it for the next two months,” she said. “Having the winner in Japan just before I announced it wasn’t planned, I was always going to do it on that day, but now I can go around on a high so that people don’t think I’m doing it because I have to, it’s because I want to.
“I’m going to see what I enjoy and what drives me. And the thing is as well, in a couple of years’ time, if nothing’s driving me, I could come back. I’ve not said, ‘no way am I ever going to be riding again’, you should never shut the door.
“As I’m feeling at the moment, it’s the right thing to do. But if anyone has a spare helicopter and a pilot, they can get in touch on Twitter.”
