HOLLIE Doyle is a good jockey. In fact, she’s a very good jockey.
That’s hardly a state secret. You would have had to have been self-isolating with Chuck Noland not to have noticed her talents as she rose through the jockeys’ ranks over the last few years.
As well as being a very good jockey, she is also a woman. Again, stating the obvious.
The problem is, one of those needs highlighting and the other doesn’t.
It’s about time the likes of Hollie, Hayley Turner, Josephine Gordon, Nicola Currie, Megan Nicholls, Georgia Cox and all the others who use the smaller racecourse changing rooms, were treated as what they are – equals.
So no more of the woman jockey, female jockey or, the even more patronising, fairer sex. They are all jockeys competing, uniquely in mainstream sport, as equals.
And, as Doyle showed with a superb five-timer on Windsor’s, she is doing rather well.
A Yarmouth treble the following day made it a wonderful weekend for the 23-year-old rider and pushed her into the top five in the Flat Jockeys’ Championship.
Former champions Ryan Moore, Jim Crowley and Silvestre de Sousa all sit below Doyle. She rode her biggest winner when Dame Malliot landed the Group 2 Princess Of Wales’s Stakes in July and was snapped up to ride as retained jockey for Derby-winning owner-breeder Imad Al Sagar.
People are clearly noticing her talent not her gender.
Like Meriel Tufnell, Gay Kellaway, Alex Greaves and Hayley Turner before her, Doyle has taken women jockeys to the next level.
And that level means racing should celebrate her achievements as a rider, not continually highlight spurious landmarks as a female jockey.
Hopefully, Doyle will win her first Group 1 race in the not-too-distant future. I say that, not because she is a woman, but because she is a bloody good jockey who deserves to bag a top prize.
And when she does, it would be nice if the focus was on her ability and not on her gender.
When Jessie Harrington, Eve Johnson Houghton, Venetia Williams, Lucinda Russell or Emma Lavelle wins a big race, the urge to highlight the successful trainer’s gender rightly disappeared years ago.
It was interesting to read the other day where The Guardian newspaper was going to concentrate it’s sports coverage amid cost-cutting measures.
Less racing, more women’s sport, was one of the main themes. It’s rather ironic that the left-leaning paper will be covering more events confined to women but less in a sport where both sexes compete on equal terms.
Let’s face it, it couldn’t be a commercial decision. Few advertisers are going to be keen to spend their marketing budget on space alongside reports from women’s football, rugby and cricket as the attendance numbers just don’t justify it.
The majority want to watch top-class sport. Whether that’s between men, women, Martians or one-legged Ewoks, it doesn’t matter.
It just happens men’s sport, at this present time, is the strongest. If there were mixed teams in football, cricket, rugby, golf and virtually any other sport there wouldn’t be a single woman in the Premiership, County Cricket or the Ryder Cup.
Ooh, sexist, will be the predictable cry. Not at all. It’s fact.
That’s why the success of women in racing is all the more remarkable. But to continually bang on about it when the likes of Doyle, Turner and plenty of others have proved over a good number of years that they are good enough to more than hold their own in an ultra-competitive sport is nothing short of patronising.
Their success should be celebrated as extremely talented jockeys – not as women doing well in a man’s world.
They have proved beyond doubt, on the track, it isn’t. Now that really is something racing can be proud about.
