Rachael Blackmore, who won the 2021 Grand National aboard Minella Times, is back for more this year. Blackmore will ride in the showpiece Minella Indo on Saturday. Although female jockeys are still vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts, several women have notably ridden in previous Nationals.
Geraldone Rees (on Cheers, 1982)
Five years after Charlotte Brew became the first woman to race in the race, Rees became the first to complete the course, finishing eighth and last on Cheers behind Grittar.
She was supposed to ride Gordon’s Lad, but that fell through and she was undercut on Cheers at a sale, but his new owners said they had no jockey. “It was on, off, on, off, but in the end I had a blast driving it,” she recalls.
“I watched the video recently and was amazed at how close we were on the first circuit. I knew he didn’t have a snowball’s chance if he showed up in the finish, so took an outside route and played it safe to get around it.
“He was a schoolmaster, a great jumper, and there were two different groups of us going off on the second circuit, seven or eight in front, and then a similar number of us a bit distant. On Becher’s second time, two loose horses balked and took out half a dozen of my party. I jumped around each other until he started to pull away from the Melling Road.
“It was quite a big thing in the media, women had been trying to make ends meet for a few years and it set a benchmark. I’m now selling horse trailers and someone in the office said, ‘You should put this, that you were the first to pass the National, on the website.’ We were working on that on Wednesday!”
Tarnya Sherwood (on Numerate, 1989)
As Tarnya Davies, she rode her father’s Numerate, purchased from her future husband Oliver, at the 1989 National.
“Dad bought him a fortnight before the race because he was a fantastic show jumper for me that allowed me to realize a dream,” she remembers. “He stopped just before the 21st (Becher’s second time). On good ground I think he would have jumped around, but he struggled in the mud. It was the most amazing sensation. Totally unique. I remember walking around the start next to Peter Scudamore, who was always helpful with advice. I told him I felt sick and he said he felt the same. The fact that the multiple champion jockey felt the same way put me at ease.
“The other thing I remember very clearly was that Numerate’s side was bad to look at and after a round of passing the stable staff I heard someone say, ‘It’s still there!’ I certainly jumped every fence at least once.
“There was always mutual teasing with Ginger McCain. He had an opinion about female jockeys and I always told him that one day he would win. When I stayed near his garden in Cheshire I would go to his grave. In the National after he died, Seabass had a real chance of winning the prize ahead of Katie Walsh, so we picked him ahead of him in the sweepstakes and said to him, “Guess what you got in the National?” and placed his name under a stone at his grave.
“All I wanted to do since I was five years old was to be a jockey and compete in the National. It was all thanks to Elizabeth Taylor and that movie. When Many Clouds won it (trained by her husband) it was phenomenal. An extraordinary experience. I may not have ridden a winner, but at least I was involved.”
Penny Ffitch-Heyes (on Hettinger, 1988)
Today she is a jockey agent from Chicago, USA, where she has lived since 1993. Among the jockeys she has cared for in the past are Hall of Fame riders Randy Romero, Jacinto Vasquez and Kent Desormaux.
“There were three of us in the women’s locker room that year: Gee Armytage, Venetia Williams and me. Hettinger was a Pumpton specialist who had taken a huge gamble on his first start in Britain after coming over from Ireland. I’m not sure the Irish point-to-point form was easily available at the time and he was backed from 50-1 to 5-2.
“The atmosphere at the National was incredible. I couldn’t believe the size of the fences when I walked the course with Bob Champion. But they were inviting and the horses slowed down to jump over them when they got there.
“He was actually number 41, but came in as a reserve. He simply forgot to turn off his landing gear, which he did every now and then. I’ve never been to a fence so fast in my life, it was balls to the wall. I was angry that it lasted so short. I dislocated my collarbone, but female jockeys had gotten a bad reputation – Jayne Thompson had recently been murdered and a few others had just been paralyzed – so I didn’t say anything about it. I’m so happy we had a female winner.”
Gee Bradburne, born Armytage (on Gee-A, 1988)
Thanks to two winners at the 1987 Cheltenham Festival, Gee Armytage was the darling of the National Hunt world. When Mark Dwyer was injured she came in for the national ride on one of those Cheltenham winners, The Ellier. It was, she says, the one that got away. She broke her knee in the Topham on a horse she had not been allowed to ride two days earlier and The Ellier finished fifth behind Maori Venture.
Gee A showed up the next year, but the ground was soft and she pulled him up. “The locker room was separate from the weighing room, so to get to your attendant or the scale, you had to push your way through the crowd,” she recalls. “There was a little old lady, who was knitting, looking after some curly sandwiches, totally uninterested in racing and in charge of the changing room and women (mostly working on TV) were always coming in to use the toilet, but you felt totally isolated there.
“There were three that year and it seemed like we were doing fashion shoots for the pepper every day in the run-up. It was almost too much and distracted from the work.”
She was PA to AP McCoy for 15 years, married another jockey Mark Bradburne and their daughter Katie is in the British pony jumping team.
Carrie Ford (on Forest Gunner, 2005)
She was a small but athletic horse, trained by her husband Richard. She came out of retirement ten weeks after the birth of daughter Hannah to ride and win the 2004 Foxhunters.
“I had hung up my boots to get Hannah, but the amateur in the yard had had a spectacular row with Richard and left, so we had no one to ride him,” she recalls. “It was a bit of a calculated risk because I wasn’t that fit and if he had been behind the bridle I wouldn’t have done it, but he was a frontrunner who didn’t need to be pushed.
‘I announced I was retiring again and added a tongue-in-cheek comment ‘unless he competed in the National.’ There was no way he could get in, but Peter Buchanana won the Grand Sefton and then the Haydock National stage with him and the owners supported me while I was riding. I had been riding for over a year, so I was fit again. Ginger McCain said at the weights luncheon, “Carrie is a big girl, but she’s a broodmare now and broodmares don’t win Nationals.”
“It was always a joke with him. I wasn’t mortally offended, far from it, but when asked I said, ‘Until Red Rum came along, a taxi driver wouldn’t have won the National either!’ You had to give just as much as you did with Ginger. I wasn’t a racing feminist, but it made me more determined.
“It was a competitive year. There were eight to ten of us and we had a chance to cross the Melling Road. It was anyone’s race, but when jumping the penultimate it was as if the ignition had been turned off. He didn’t stay. I was happy. I couldn’t have finished closer, there was no bad luck and we both gave everything.”
Today she is the Northern Education Officer for Racing To School and helps with pony racing, creating the next generation of jockeys and racegoers.
Katie Walsh (on sea bass, 2012)
Walsh, Ruby’s amateur riding sister, was the first female jockey to ride a favorite and finish in the top four when Seabass finished third just five lengths behind Neptune Collonges on her first of six rides in the 2012 race.
“He had had a great run-up and there was huge momentum behind him,” she recalls. “When I crossed the Melling Road I thought I was going to win, but from the penultimate I felt like I wasn’t full horse. He didn’t jump the last big one, but I was already treading water. “I don’t look back at it that often. I had a great plan, but I got sucked into it a bit, I was too handsy from Becher’s second go. I had seen enough Nationals and didn’t think that would happen to me. If I could ride it again I would have held it a little longer, floating from fence to fence when I should have been saying ‘wee, wee’.
“I got a great kick out of it at the time. When you get defeated, you look at what you could have done better. Sometimes when you were third and should have been fifth, you thought you couldn’t improve, but I would have liked to try again. Of the six rides I went on, this was by far the best ride I had.
Now married to trainer Ross O’Sullivan and mother of two, she will sell two breeze-up yearlings at Newmarket next week.