When Shark Hanlon booked Rachael Blackmore, a 21-year-old conditional without a winner under Rules to her name, to ride Stowaway Pearl in a handicap hurdle at Thurles in February 2011, he thought it best that she did not know there was more than just the prize money at stake.
“At the time, she wasn’t working for me,” Hanlon said this week. “It was [leading jockey] Davy Russell who recommended her.
“We were having a few quid on the horse that day and I didn’t want to tell her. I remember saying to her: ‘Listen, when you’re going across the top, kick and don’t look back.’ She came down to the last and she couldn’t resist, she had to have a little look back to see how far it was, and she was 15 lengths in front.”
With hindsight, it seems fair to say that had Blackmore known the money was down, it is unlikely to have made much difference. A decade on from her first winner at Thurles, she is one of the National Hunt weighing room’s elite riders, with 12 Grade One wins and still in with a chance to finish the season as Ireland’s champion over jumps.
Blackmore can also look forward to her best book of rides at the Cheltenham Festival next week, including Honeysuckle, the favourite for Tuesday’s Champion Hurdle, and A Plus Tard, third‑favourite for the Gold Cup. She is only 12-1, too, to finish the meeting as its leading rider for the first time.
Yet there were times, as there are for any young conditional, when as Hanlon puts it, “people thought it was madness” for Blackmore to take aim at the summit. Katy Walsh and Nina Carberry were exceptional and successful riders a decade ago, but both rode as amateurs and for families with a racing heritage that stretched back generations. Blackmore had no family connection to racing to put her on the first rung of the ladder, at a time when no female jump jockey had turned professional in Ireland since the mid-1980s.
Attitudes have changed in the decade since, something Blackmore’s sustained success at the highest level has helped to accelerate. But she has had to work tirelessly to achieve what might feel to some like almost an overnight success, with a further 11 Grade One winners since Minella Indo took the Albert Bartlett Novice Hurdle at Cheltenham two seasons ago.
Hanlon played a major part in setting Blackmore on her way. “She rode her first bumper winner for me, her first hurdle winner for me, her first chase winner and her first point‑to-point winner,” he says.
“She was always a great girl, always very dedicated, and a great worker, unreal. She had a lot of ability and I knew she had it and she had the heart to try hard. That’s what got her where she is, and she’s a hardy, she doesn’t mind the falls.
“I found she was unreal at getting horses to jump. That was one of her big, big plusses for me and I’d say for everyone else now.”
Lingfield Park
1.53 Merry Secret
2.23 Pure Perfection
2.55 Glasvegas
3.28 Fard
3.58 Copinet
4.33 Albert Camus
5.08 Iconic Belle
Warwick
1.37 Finistere
2.07 Calico
2.37 Pink Legend
3.12 Embole (nb)
3.42 A Time To Shine (nap)
4.15 Looks Like Power
4.50 Bizerta
5.22 Mucho Mas
While Hanlon was Blackmore’s biggest supporter in the early days, it is her association with Henry de Bromhead since the spring of 2018 that has moved her up and on into the elite.
All her Grade One winners have been for De Bromhead, including one aboard A Plus Tard, the horse who could make her the first female rider to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup on Friday. Her ride on Honeysuckle to win last year’s Mares’ Hurdle, meanwhile, was one of the best of the Festival, as Blackmore seized the initiative along the inside rail, turning in before holding off the charging favourite, Benie Des Dieux, up the hill.
“She didn’t really get our job,” De Bromhead says. “She rode her way into it. I never really offered it to her. Eddie O’Leary [racing manager to Michael O’Leary’s Gigginstown Stud] suggested I should try using her when we were in Aintree in 2018.
“That was April; in May she started riding a few for us, and she kept winning and that was it. She’s brilliant at getting them to jump but she’s an all-rounder too, she’s great at judging pace, she’s got it all really.
“Of the bigger days, her ride on Honeysuckle in the Mares’ was brilliant, but there would be many, many more, just day-to-day ones.
“She’s very stylish and out in the country there’s the lengths she’d be making at a fence, which would also mean that you’d be in a good rhythm and a good tempo.”
Hanlon admits some of his owners needed some persuading to use a female rider on their horse a decade ago. “When I told people I was wanting to give her a ride on this horse or that,” he says, “they didn’t go against me, but they mightn’t have been very happy.
“But she never gave a horse a bad ride and she’s been very hard on herself. If she thought she’d given a horse a bad ride, she’d be disgusted with herself. Everyone is born with a talent and she’s born to ride horses.”
