There was a moment as her triumphs accumulated at the recent Cheltenham Festival when you sensed Rachael Blackmore tire of the endless desire to frame her story as some kind of suffragette’s uprising.
t was less what she said than what she didn’t as yet another post-race interview arced melodramatically towards the celebration of a modern-day Emmeline Pankhurst.
Blackmore is no self-publicist and in essentially ignoring Matt Chapman’s question, she made clear a desire to stop talking about gender. A desire based on one now unshakable truth.
She isn’t the best female jockey in National Hunt today. She is the best jockey.
Just as those rope-thin gods of the game – Ruby Walsh and AP McCoy and Barry Geraghty – recently slipped into retirement in the same, small pocket of time, it just so happened that the one to pick up their mantle was a dairy farmer’s daughter from Killenaule.
It’s undeniably racing’s glory that she could do that, as Walsh averred last Saturday after Blackmore’s surgically precise ride on Minella Times added the Aintree Grand National to her recent bulk-trawl of the sport’s most treasured crowns.
Jumping over fences requires a hard lunacy in those who frequent the hierarchical environment of a weigh-room. It is a place that makes no allowances for physical fear or psychological reticence.
When the hazards of a job demand an ambulance tracks your movement, there can be little ambiguity about your acceptance of danger.
But women have long moved past the image of demure confections in that environment.
It is more than a decade, after all, since Walsh’s sister – Katie – held off a hard-charging Nina Carberry to win the National Hunt Chase on the first day of the 2010 Cheltenham Festival.
Walsh and Carberry were duly suspended for excessive use of the whip on their respective mounts, Poker De Sivola and Becauseicouldntsee that day.
The days of a patronising soundtrack to every new step taken by a female jockey belong in the distant mists of time and Blackmore has long been keenly aware of that.
On Saturday, she was quick to stress: “This is a massive deal for me personally, not the fact I’m a female. The thing that hit me when I crossed the line was that I’d won the National, not that I’m the first female to win the National.”
Maybe it was inevitable that the history of the moment, a first female winning jockey in a race being run since 1839, would supplant any other narrative unspooling on Saturday.
But Blackmore, palpably, has little patience for the appetite to trumpet her as some kind of ground-breaker, given the aforementioned Katie Walsh finished third on Seabass in 2012.
She yearns for us to consider these days without that asterisk about gender. And it seems the least her achievements deserve.
There is no evidence of ego in her bearing. On the contrary, every interview is punctuated by expressions of gratitude, declarations of outrageous luck and the over-riding sense of someone seeing herself almost as a kind of house-breaker, making off with someone else’s silver.
She is an enigma of sorts.
An elegant vase of grace and femininity out of the saddle; coiled, nerveless and patently ruthless in it.
Even to those of us with an uneducated eye, there is something of the academic in her race-riding, an aura of patience and control in that ability to position her mount through stealth almost.
It is as if she arrives in silence, unseen. But jump-racing is primarily a world of pain and mud and broken bones.
Given her dominance of this year’s Cheltenham Festival, it’s broadly forgotten that she had four falls that week too.
That she made mistakes (not least picking the wrong Henry de Bromhead horse for the Gold Cup) and admitted to leaving the Cotswolds that Friday more preoccupied with mounts that lost than the six that won.
She is self-deprecating about a career path that never set off with this scale of celebrity as its destination.
After sitting her Leaving Cert, Blackmore studied science at UCD, took a business degree at Griffith College, then equine science at UL.
Her ambition was to be a vet, who just rode horses for the pleasure.
‘Shark’ Hanlon was one of the few trainers open to having her on his horses back then and he was among those encouraging her to turn professional in 2015, simply on the basis that her 7lb claim would offer obvious appeal to others.
She did so because, in her own words, there was “nothing to lose”. But it took six months for Blackmore to ride a winner. This fairytale took its time to flower.
“I never envisaged I’d make a career or make a living out of being a jockey,” she said in an interview with The Irish Field last year.
“I had dreamt of riding in Cheltenham, but not ride a Cheltenham winner.
“Turning professional was a lot about that I was going to be able to claim 7lb of 9-10, which was going to open up a lot more opportunities for me.”
Blackmore declares herself to have been “probably the oldest ever champion conditional”.
It was Eddie O’Leary who suggested her as an option for De Bromhead and, together, they have become the hottest trainer-jockey combination in National Hunt today.
“My God, what Henry de Bromhead does with these horses, I don’t know,” she said in the immediate aftermath of Saturday’s win. “But I’m so lucky to be riding them.”
De Bromhead, his personality cut from the same cloth, chimed in response: “She’s the key obviously, she hardly left the rail. We’re so lucky to have her.”
It had been a uniquely odd day at Aintree. No crowds in the stands, no connections in the ring and a lone singer on a balcony delivering God Save The Queen as the jockeys jogged to their mounts in almost eerie quiet. The place looked skeletal and a little depressing.
But then 40 550kg creatures went tanking away at close to 50kmh and, in the grand tradition of a Grand National, hearts were in mouths just watching.
Blackmore and Minella Times were never out of the first eight, always looking in perfect sync together.
And, truth to tell, by the time they arrived at the elbow, there was only going to be one winner.
“I don’t feel a male or female right now, I don’t even feel human,” she declared afterwards, the line a god-send for Sunday newspaper headline writers.
Ten years after riding her first winner as an amateur, Rachael Blackmore had arrived at the very apex of her profession.
Had she dreamt of the moment?
“Yeah, I think everyone thinks about that,” she admitted candidly. “You know you think about what you’d say, how you were going to feel and all of this. But it’s an unimaginable feeling.
“I can’t believe I am Rachael Blackmore, genuinely. I still feel like I’m that little kid (riding ponies) and I just can’t believe that I’m me.”
The best jockey in the weigh-room, pure and simple. Her brilliance the story, not her gender.
