Nina Carberry© Photo Healy Racing
Paddy Payne got into hot water when suggesting his injured Melbourne Cup winning sister, Michelle, might jack in being a jockey in order to go and have babies. Much of the indignant response neglected to factor in frayed familial nerves contributing to an unfortunately blunt quote. But if the bare words were regrettable they did kick off more debate about female jockeys. And that got me thinking of another successful female jockey down under.
Tallaght native Samantha Wynne has ridden almost 160 winners in New Zealand since first going there in 2012. Within two years she was champion apprentice on the South Island. Wynne is now among the top 20 riders in New Zealand where over forty per cent of all professional jockeys are women, including Lisa Allpress, the country’s top rider. It has been a long circuitous route to a good and successful professional life on the other side of the world.
Wynne graduated from RACE in 2005, had 24 rides in almost three years here and never rode a winner. She says one leading trainer here advised her that she would never make it as a jockey. Wynne’s first taste of racecourse success came in an apprentice series in Slovakia of all places. New Zealand was a last throw of the dice, a chance to find what generations of Irish people have travelled the world for — a start.
It’s the perennial problem for all young people eager to follow the dream of becoming a professional jockey, but a particular problem for young women, as evidenced by a recent visit to RACE to talk to some of the 2016 class. Below is a link to the details of what they said and the context of some prejudices that still appear set in stone, particularly the old line about the issue of strength when it comes to female jockeys
click here
Now the automatic response to a story like Wynne’s, or Julie Krone’s in America, is that it’s a very different ball game race riding around flat fast-ground ovals than it is powering through heavy ground at somewhere like Clonmel. But how much of that is male delusion about brute force? Nina Carberry is the finest female riding talent this country has seen and once outlined to this corner how it is often fitness that counts.
“Ninety nine per cent of riding well is tactical. If a horse is already under pressure it’s not going to do much for a few more slaps,” she said. “What matters isn’t as much strength as balance and fitness. A lot of the time fitness is mistaken for strength. You have to be fit to push one out from three furlongs out and then get involved in a driving finish.”
On the flat especially, where, quite often, less is more, that makes sense. Making generalisations on the basis of gender makes no sense, especially when the gender balance at RACE is almost equal and the industry as a whole is crying about staff shortages. It is also nonsensical to train up enthusiastic youngsters, most of who are sustained by the unlikely dream of becoming a professional jockey, and then effectively send them to the airport to try and find a start somewhere else.
Not everyone can become a jockey, and opportunities are by definition limited in Ireland. But with humanity getting heavier, there is surely a self-interest in providing more opportunities for the greater numbers of young and enthusiastic women coming into the industry to test themselves at home before eventually having to consider the plane.
Many of us are instinctively suspicious of quota systems but in the circumstances, might it not be worth considering certain steps, perhaps even moving to put in place special confined races for female apprentices. Or is that a sexist notion in itself? It is often a tiny initial break however that can produce spectacular results. And those results surely don’t have to bloom 12,000 miles away.
Now that ground conditions are firming up, and the Met Office juju merchants are seeing heat-waves in the meteorological tealeaves, the issue of summer ground conditions for National Hunt racing is likely to become a hot one again.
That all steps should be taken to stop that happening is self-evident. If ‘good to yielding’ is widely deemed the perfect National Hunt surface for the valuable festival meetings, then failure to prevent conditions getting too quick at lesser meetings will be presumed to be about inferior horses not being worth it.
Equine fatalities are not always directly due to quick ground. There can be any number of factors involved. And there are always trainers and owners with their own agenda when it comes to getting fast conditions. The usual ‘catch-all’ phrase is that ground should be ‘safe’ or have ‘no jar,’ the sort of vague terminology that leaves convenient space to try and keep everyone happy.
But if there’s consensus that ground on the slow side of good is the ambition, then shouldn’t it always be the ambition, all the time, everywhere?
And finally, about that little race run at Epsom on Saturday: I haven’t a breeze as to what’s going to win it. There can’t be many in possession of confidence about a Derby widely dismissed as sub-standard but which does at least fascinate in terms of its permutations.
Having long fancied Idaho as a potential long-shot for the frame, it is nevertheless disconcerting to see Ballydoyle with up to half a dozen possible runners. It may not be up there with 2007’s eight starters but the old line comes to mind about believing you have a multitude of Derby contenders effectively meaning there’s none.
Banking on the Dante is usually a safe option but does Wings Of Desire look an Epsom horse? Might the Dante runner up , Deauville, be a bit of value to reverse it on very fast ground? I don’t know but I still suspect the outstanding three year old at Epsom this week will be running in the Oaks. Mind how you go.
