Gary Lineker once summed up football as ‘a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.’ Ascot’s Dubai Duty Free Shergar Cup, a team contest in which four teams of three international jockeys, one of them restricted to female riders, compete for points on randomly drawn horses, is going the same way.
In this month’s contest the Ladies team, led as usual by everybody’s favourite girl next door Hayley Turner and including Yorkshire’s Joanna Mason, won for the fourth time in six years. Hayley herself triumphed in two of the six races and for the third time collected the Alistair Haggis Silver Saddle for the most points.
I won’t ever be a total fan of team horseracing , which is almost a contradiction in terms, but after 23 years the Shergar Cup has somehow become a fun fixture in my diary. It is always interesting to see international stars in action who this year included Rachel Venniker, the only female professional rider in South Africa, and Bauyrzhan Murzabayev who started in long-distance races aged seven in his native Kazakhstan and has been four times champion jockey in Germany. Nothing though could have been more appropriate in this year’s Shergar Cup races than Hayley Turner’s success.
Ascot is a tricky course which she rides as well as anybody. In the two mile Stayers race she led all the way on Andrew Balding’s Ranch Hand, was headed shortly before the post but had kept enough in Ranch Hand’s tank and her own to come again and grab the race on the line from Seamie Heffernan on Beamish.
Congratulated afterwards on such exquisite judgment of pace, she commented that she was better known for swooping in the final stages of contests on the Round Mile around. In the final race she did precisely that on David O’Meara’s New Image to deny her Ladies team colleague Joanna Mason by a short head on the left-lugging Yantarni.
‘I’m so pleased for her’ said Andrew Balding after Hayley’s victory on Ranch Hand ‘because she works so hard’. So she does. As her agent Guy Jewell pointed out to me when Hayley leaves her Newmarket base to ride work for Andrew it is a 4am start. Many more of us were pleased with Hayley’s Shergar Cup triumph because it was a deserved day in the spotlight for a rider whose achievement in riding 1,000 winners, a total logged at Yarmouth in July, didn’t receive a tenth of the attention it should have done.
Hayley, who as usual was accompanied by a vocal section of the Turner clan and was looking forwards to the Sugababes and Scouting for Girls gigs afterwards, noted how the late Alistair Haggis had helped female riders by suggesting that the Shergar Cup teams should each include a female jockey.
Her own contribution to raising the profile of women riders has been crucial. A former joint champion apprentice, she was the first female to ride 100 winners in a calendar year and her first Group One victory, on Dream Ahead for David Simcock in the July Cup in 2011, was the first outright for a woman rider. Thank heavens that she came back from an early retirement.
Too many women riders are still being told, ‘Sorry, but the owners aren’t keen on having a girl’
My only worry is whether we have really come as far in giving women riders opportunities as we like to think on Shergar Cup day. Maybe by handing 50 per cent of the riding slots to females, the organisers are contributing to a false impression. Yes there are now female stars like Hollie Doyle who has ridden more than 100 winners in each of the last five years. Rachael Blackmore has been champion rider at the Cheltenham Festival and ridden a Grand National winner.
But Rachel King, who picked up the ride of the day prize at the Shergar Cup on Insanity, had to move to Australia to collect the cluster of Group Ones on her CV after finding it impossible to get going in Britain. Nearly 40 per cent of apprentice licences in Britain are now held by females but only 12 per cent of full-time professional riders on the Flat are women.
If you look at the official figures for the last Flat season, Hollie Doyle is in seventh place but after that you go down to 27th to find the next female rider, Saffie Osborne whose considerable talents are probably given more than average attention because her father Jamie is a trainer.
After Saffie with her 70 victories the highest placed woman was Hayley Turner in 60th position with 38 victories. The only others in the top 100 were Joanna Mason (62nd), Laura Pearson (84th), Gina Mangan (88th), Josephine Gordon (94th) and Mollie Phillips (96th).
Younger trainers are noticeably readier than older ones to give rides to female riders, but there are still too many women riders being told, ‘Sorry, but the owners aren’t keen on having a girl’, especially when the horses they have helped to educate move into higher grade races.
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