The turf | 4 July 2019

When Hayley Turner was made, she wasn’t just given a competitive spirit, a sensitive pair of hands and excellent balance. Somebody screwed her head on the right way too. Profiled by the Racing Post after becoming the first woman to ride a Royal Ascot winner for 32 years on Thanks Be, she was embarrassed to take the limelight away from trainer Charlie Fellowes, who was also recording his first Royal Ascot success, and swift to urge her interviewer not to go down the feminist-icon route: ‘Maybe it’s going to help the girls in the future, give them another goal, but that’s it, full stop. There’s no need to keep going on about it.’

She’s right. We don’t any longer have to make a fetish of feminine success in the only elite sport in which women compete on equal terms with men. Josie Gordon has already followed Hayley in riding 100 winners in a season. Over jumps Bryony Frost, Lizzie Kelly and Rachael Blackmore all rode winners at this year’s Cheltenham Festival where women won 14 per cent of the races from only 9 per cent of the rides. Although half the country’s trainers still haven’t put up a woman rider, a new Liverpool University study pointed out that, over jumps at least, women riders offer punters better value than men and at Windsor last Saturday I sat on the weighing-room steps in the baking heat with an advancing female rider who could prove the best one yet. Nicola Currie comes from the Isle of Arran and her matter-of-fact manner and readiness with the right word reminded me of no one more than Willie Carson.

Having started in show-jumping, Nicola was introduced to racing at the stables run by Lucinda Russell and Peter Scudamore, as good a grounding as any could hope for.