If Hayley Turner’s conversation is any guide, there is no truth to the surprisingly persistent rumours that her return to race-riding in Saturday’s Shergar Cup is only the first stage of a planned comeback. The 33-year-old is cheerily vague about her future but finds it much easier to contemplate being a broadcaster than getting back in the saddle full-time.
A regular face on At The Races this year, she has had an interview with the new ITV racing team that will take over terrestrial coverage of the sport in January. Turner would be only too delighted to be one of their presenters for the next four years, which certainly seems to kill off any idea that she expects to be back riding professionally in 2017.
“It was ages ago and I’ve not heard anything,” she says of her meeting with ITV; several more established TV people are in the same situation. “It’s not something I’m relying on but if it happened, it would be fantastic.”
Britain’s most successful female jockey, Turner has said explicitly and more than once that she really is not planning a comeback but this appears to have met with a sceptical response. People were stunned by her retirement last year, when she was still getting more than enough support to make a healthy living, and it seems they are still waiting for her to admit it was all a terrible mistake. Jockeys are expected to hang around until the game gives up on them, not quit while they’re ahead. But Turner had months to live with her decision before her last day’s riding in November, showed no doubt at any stage and does not do so now. She got what she wanted out of race-riding, finally reaching a point where the rewards no longer made up for the grind.
Her new life moves at a steadier pace and she seems convincingly happy about that, chatting over breakfast at the Bedford Lodge, Newmarket’s smartest hotel, where she is still a regular in the gym. She has cycled here with Oscar, the young son of her partner, who sips a Shirley Temple and listens patiently to stories he must have heard before, like the time Turner got done for speeding at 4am when there was no one else in sight on the M25.
In fairness to those who enforce such laws, she admits to doing about 100mph at the time, racing to cover the 150 miles from Newmarket to Manton, where she was due to ride work. It is exactly the kind of experience she does not miss.
“Doing it for 15 years, it’s quite repetitive. You’re going racing, driving every day, in the same places, seeing the same faces, same horses. Unless you have a really good, high-profile job, you don’t actually make a fortune out of it either, because you have to pay your travel expenses. What I’m doing now, I’m doing less work and making more money.”
Only some of that comes from broadcasting but she relishes that line of work, doing 60 days a year on ATR and helping to find the fun in racing on irreverent shows like Get In! and Get Up! She thinks the sport’s terrestrial coverage could benefit from a similar approach and fears Channel 4 gives too much time to dry discussion of form.
“They’re just reciting stuff that we can sit on a computer and look at and I don’t think everyone’s interested in that. We can Google that. Show us something that we can’t. Like, go racing with the lads in a car with a camera, something like that. I feel that more interaction with guests … rather than have four presenters, why not have one and have four guests and maybe have a bit more insights into the jockeys and get to know them more on a personal level, a bit more banter perhaps. It’s a sport with a lot of class and we’re not going to turn it into anything but that, but there are lighter ways to approach things.”
Further TV chatter must be put on hold. It is now time for Turner to get back on the horse, for what may be the very last time in public. She has limbered up by taking nine rides in recent weeks and admits to some aches and pains as a result but she got within half a length of a surprise success at Carlisle this week and appears ready.
Along with the Canadian Emma‑Jayne Wilson and the Devon-born apprentice Josephine Gordon, she will try to repeat last year’s Shergar Cup success by the Girls Team. It is an event at which she has often fared well and Frankie Dettori is the only jockey who can rival her for popularity among the large, family‑based crowd. Purists will look the other way but for Turner this is one of the highlights of each year.
“How can people moan about it? It’s a fun day, it attracts a non-racing audience, it’s good prize money, they’re good-quality horses, what is there not to like about it? But people are always going to grumble, aren’t they? Racing’s like that. You change something and they all grumble but then they get used to it.”
