F EATURE RACHAEL BLACKMORE
H eading into the new Jump season, Rachael will be adding a new role to her roster, the ambassador for the West region of The Jockey Club which covers Cheltenham and Aintree racecourses. “I am excited to be an ambassador for The Jockey Club for the upcoming season. Cheltenham and Aintree are not only special places to me, but special places in racing so it is an honour to be able to be associated with the courses.” Within Rachael’s role she will be continuing her work to inspire the next generation of racing stars through The Jockey Club’s connection to Park Palace Ponies in Liverpool, St James City Farm in Gloucester and the Junior Jumper™ membership. Ian Renton, Regional Managing Director of The Jockey Club West: “We are delighted to have Rachael as our ambassador for the next season. What she achieved this year is absolutely extraordinary, and what her triumphs did for the sport is incredible. We very much look forward to working with her and hopefully seeing her have another record breaking season.” Rachael has been breaking through ceilings the whole way through her career. For many, they would assume this is as a ‘female’ jockey. It isn’t. She has achieved things that very few jockeys have or will ever do – male or female. While she may have become the first female jockey to win the Unibet Champion Hurdle aboard the unbeatable Honeysuckle, and the first female jockey to win the world’s greatest Steeplechase in the Randox Grand National, she equalled the great RubyWalsh’s record of five Grade One wins in a single Cheltenham Festival. She then became only the second ever jockey to win the Unibet Champion Hurdle and Randox Grand National in the same year – Sir Anthony McCoy was the other. Not bad company, right?
Rachael came to the game a lot later than most. She rode in her first point-to-point aged 20 (most begin aged 16) and continued to point-to-point until she was 25 years old, notching up more than 170 rides before opting to turn conditional, a decision made harder by her desire to become champion female point-to-point rider. She became the first female Champion Conditional jockey in Ireland aged 27 years old, considered “old” for a conditional jockey. Ahead of her historic Grand National win, Rachael sat down with friend and former Weighing Room colleague, Katie Walsh to discuss her journey. She recalls: “That was something that crossed my mind when I had the option to turn conditional and become professional. I was kind of thinking ‘I’ll never have the opportunity to be champion anything if I turn’. I thought that if I kept working at it there was a chance I could be champion lady (point-to-point) rider one day and it was an ambition that I had. I was weighing up the pros and cons of turning conditional and that was definitely something I thought about – but I didn’t expect to be champion conditional in 2016-17. “I genuinely mean this, when I turned conditional my sole aimwas to lose my 7lb claim, which was a massive achievement in itself for me. I turned professional in 2015 on St Patrick’s Day and I just thought coming into a summer where there was a trainer telling me there was plenty of horses for me to ride, so I was better off on those than I was on a five-year-old maiden point-to- pointer. I just wanted to be riding, so it was a no-brainer for me and that’s something that so many jockeys don’t have – someone to get behind you. “It took me from the time I turned (in March) to September to get a winner and people were often asking if I’d done the right thing, but it didn’t get to me at all because I was riding all the time. I was going
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