Boxing Day 2015 was the afternoon when Lizzie Kelly’s riding career took a huge stride forward. Her four-length victory on Tea For Two in the Kauto Star Novice Chase at Kempton Park was the first win ever recorded by a female jockey in a Grade One jumps event in Britain or Ireland, and Kelly’s breakthrough ran the King George itself very close in terms of the attention it received. She was a young jockey on a roll. Or so it seemed.
Twelve months later a brief glance at the card for the King George VI Chase might suggest that Kelly’s year has proceeded as planned. Tea For Two is in the big-race field, with Kelly booked to ride, and quoted at around 16-1 to give his jockey another landmark success. Dig a little deeper, though, and another story emerges: a tale of frustration, disappointment and a glass ceiling that may not have been shattered quite as thoroughly as it seemed.
Kelly followed up her Grade One victory last Christmas by winning the Betfair Hurdle at Newbury in February, one of the most valuable and competitive handicaps in the calendar. She finished the 2015-16 season in April with 15 wins, and 32 in her career in all, a total that also includes the Lanzarote Hurdle in January 2015 and a valuable Grade Three handicap at Haydock two months earlier.
In the current season, however, the winners have dried up. Kelly has recorded only three victories since May and what is perhaps a greater concern for the punters as she heads out to ride Tea For Two on Monday is that the rides have dried up as well. Kelly has ridden a mere 34 horses since the start of October and only three of those were for trainers other than Nick Williams, her stepfather and principal employer.
The King George is such a valuable and prestigious race that Kelly cannot claim the 5lb conditionals’ allowance that helps to offset her relative inexperience when she is up against senior jockeys in lesser events. And yet the big-name jockeys she will be up against on Monday – Daryl Jacob, Paddy Brennan, Tom Scudamore and Noel Fehily – might start to wonder if their agent had lost their mobile number if they dipped below 34 rides in a fortnight.
“It’s frustrating,” Kelly said this week. “It’s heartbreaking, in fact, that I’ve ridden only three winners this season. But if the horses aren’t winning but I’m still giving them good rides and they’re running good races, what more can I do?
“I’m kind of happy with the way things are going in that I’m laying the foundations for a career that’s based with a very successful and stable yard. There are a lot of people who would absolutely love being stable jockey to a yard like Nick Williams has. We don’t have a lot of horses, there’s 35 down there and a relatively high percentage are running in very competitive races on Saturdays, which is what you want to do as a jockey.
“I cannot let my head go negative. I have to be positive all the time. I can’t walk out at Kempton on Boxing Day thinking, ‘Why don’t I get any outside rides?’ It’s just not something I think about because I know it wouldn’t be good for me.”
The question of whether a Y-chromosome might have made a difference to Kelly’s career is something else she tries to keep to the back of her mind.
“I don’t like to say it, because people don’t like people saying it,” she says. “But I won a Grade One and gave my horse a really good ride and then followed up two months later by winning another huge prize in a totally different type of race. That’s the key. It wasn’t another three-mile chase. It was a two-mile hurdle and it showed I could do everything. If I’d been a male 5lb-claimer doing that, I do think it might have been different.
“But then, people might turn round and say, you went back home, you concentrated on things down there and didn’t ride out for other people, and that’s why it’s happened. Maybe it is, but I do think I would have got a few more outside rides.”
For all the frustrations of recent months Kelly can at least look forward to a ride on Monday afternoon that dozens of senior jockeys in the weighing room would be delighted to take. Tea For Two may be a relative outsider to beat Cue Card, last year’s King George winner, and the exceptional novice Thistlecrack, but at the same time he is far from a no-hoper.
Tea For Two’s form in last year’s Kauto Star Novice Chase over the same trip as the King George is rock-solid, since Native River, this year’s Hennessy Gold Cup winner, was soundly beaten in third. Tea For Two has also had only one start over three miles since that Grade One win and he remains unexposed at staying trips over fences.
“There are things you try to tick off in your career,” Kelly says. “I rode in the Hennessy this season; that’s a massive tick. The King George is another one and the prospect of going there with a live chance is even better. Every horse has its shout and we have ours as much as anybody else.
“We’ve been careful with him, this has always been his target and we’re going there with no real miles on the clock. He beat some really good horses last year. That was really strong form. And there’s been so much media about Cue Card and Thistlecrack and their big clash, I love it that we’re quietly sneaking in there without being in the Racing Post every day.”
Kelly is alive to the possibility that anyone who tunes into racing solely on Boxing Day each year might think that her career in the saddle is progressing seamlessly.
“I think the public perception of my career is very different to how it actually is,” she says. “I think that because I’m a girl and get quite a lot of media attention, people always think I’m quite a lot more successful than I actually am.
“In a funny sort of way that can be very difficult. A wise woman told me once that you can’t believe your own marketing. With the newspaper articles and what have you that go out whenever I have a big ride, you can’t believe them yourself.
“I’m very lucky in that my family are very supportive, my friends are very supportive and the weighing room is a supportive place as well. As long as you can keep your head up and know that you are giving horses good rides that’s all you can do.”
