Rachael Blackmore retires from horse racing

Jockey Rachael Blackmore has announced her retirement and said she was 'sad but grateful' to end a glittering 16-year career.
Blackmore became the first female jockey to win the Grand National in 2021, and again made history by winning the Gold Cup a year later.
She said: 'My days of being a jockey have come to an end. I feel the time is right. I'm sad but I'm also incredibly grateful for what my life has been for the past 16 years.
'I just feel so lucky to have been legged up on the horses I have, and to have experienced success I never even dreamt could be possible.'
Prior to her Grand National triumph Blackmore had already become the first female jockey to win the Champion Hurdle aboard Honeysuckle that year and in 2022 she secured another first when steering A Plus Tard to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup.
Having won the two-mile Champion Chase at the 2024 Festival with Captain Guinness, Bob Olinger's Stayers' Hurdle win in March meant Blackmore ticked off the final championship event at Cheltenham - a feat very few jockeys complete during their career and putting Blackmore further out on her own among female riders.
Rachael Blackmore bows out as the most accomplished female jockey of all time, Flat or jump, anywhere in the world. She is a genuine role model and one of the few people from the sport to have transcended its parish boundaries.
Exactly what the farmer's daughter from Tipperary had against glass ceilings, who knows. But she leaves the sport like a town centre at 1am, scattered with broken shards and the phrase consigned to the scrap heap of cliches. She finally rendered the sex of a rider irrelevant.
The list of big races she became the first female to win, topped off by the 2021 Grand National on Minella Times, do not tell the extraordinary story of the relative late-comer to the sport who bucked all the rules about how you get going and then, for the last seven years, lit up the racing's firmament.
🚨 Rachael Blackmore, the first woman to win the Grand National, announces her retirement from racing with immediate effectWhat an incredible victory this was 🏆🏇#ITVRacing pic.twitter.com/4eEM6JXA1s
— ITV Racing (@itvracing) May 12, 2025
Educational qualifications in the weighing room are thin on the ground but she combined her studies for a degree in equine science and a diploma in business studies with amateur riding. 'In hindsight, though, I was not fulfilling my potential either academically or as a jockey,' she once told the Telegraph before adding with trademark modesty, 'if there was any potential.'
Against the advice of almost everyone who pointed her to Nina Carberry and Katie Walsh who had great ground-breaking careers but as amateurs, trainer Shark Hanlon, who had given her a first winner under rules in 2011, thought she might do better as a professional because she could do the light weights most male jockeys struggled to do and consequently might get more opportunities.
So the only ordinary amateur who was 'getting on average and not setting any records,' took the counter-intuitive decision to turn professional in 2015 becoming only the second female jockey in Irish jump racing history to do it for a living after Maria Cullen. She has never looked back.
In 2017 she was champion conditional jockey, the same year she had her first ride at the Cheltenham Festival on Linger, pulled up in the Fred Winter Juvenile Handicap Hurdle, an inauspicious start at the place she would go on to dominate to such an extent that in the crowd-free pandemic Festival of 2021 she rode six winners there and was leading rider.
I remember interviewing her before that first Cheltenham ride and what annoyed her most was the fact that Martin Pipe Conditional Jockeys Hurdle was not open to her because, at 27, she was past the 25-year-old cut off age. She had tried to get the race conditions changed. Not one to rock too many boats, it is about the most outspoken thing I can ever remember her saying.
But her career took another upward turn when Eddie O'Leary, Michael O'Leary's brother and racing manager, suggested on a taxi ride with the trainer Henry de Bromhead that she ride out for him in the summer with a view to riding a few of the Gigginstown horses in the yard.
The horses she rode for the yard started winning and it helped in a world where there is still a certain amount of prejudice against women that De Bromhead simply wanted the best available for his Waterford stable regardless of sex. He gave her the one thing no other female jockey had managed to secure: the first jockey's job at a big yard which was going places and full of good horses.
Together they have enjoyed a golden seven years, albeit tinged with the terrible tragedy, the death of De Bromhead's son Jack in a pony racing accident.
They have won two Champion Hurdles, a Gold Cup, the National, jump racing's holy trinity, the Champion Chase to complete the set of Cheltenham's big three. And while Minella Times and A Plus Tard, who also gave her a first Festival winner in 2019, were special, the horse she will be best remembered for is the mare Honeysuckle, winner of 17 of their 19 starts together. Honeysuckle was there at the start of her career and took her nearly to the end.
BOB OLINGER GOES 3/3 What a day for Rachael Blackmore who now wins the Paddy Power Stayers' Hurdle with Bob Olinger 👏#ITVRacing | #CheltenhamFestival | @rachaelblackmor | @HenrydeBromhead pic.twitter.com/Qyj8cgMEcn
— ITV Racing (@itvracing) March 13, 2025
Four of Honeysuckle's wins came at Cheltenham, in the 2020 Mares' Hurdle and in the next two Champions but if Blackmore and De Bromhead ever got a louder, more heartfelt reception than the one they got on the return to the winners' enclosure in March 2023 following the Mares Hurdle, I would like to hear it.
The great mare had been written off following her first two defeats, many thought she should have been retired and, on top of it, this was a first Festival for the De Bromheads without Jack. It was emotional on so many levels.
As a jockey, she had it all; tactical awareness, no more so than at Cheltenham. Strength in a finish, style, an ability to get horses to relax and jump, a knack of going with rather than fighting hard pullers and the capacity to take a heavy fall. However, the broken neck, which she sustained last summer and kept her out for a large part of last season, may have contributed to her decision to call it a day.
Having had a poor final season by her standards, due in part to missing so much of it, she still bounced back with a Cheltenham double for Henry de Bromhead whose horses, to that point, had also been out of form.
She was popular and respected in the weighing room which should not be dismissed; it always helps smooth the way. Above all though - and this is probably something you have to be born with - horses ran for her.
She did not seek the fame that came with such success and I am not sure she was totally comfortable with it, although with practice, she seemed to have warmed to it latterly. No doubt there will be no shortage of television work now but she always appeared much happier with her fans, particularly the legion of young ones, than she was with the media.
Her retirement leaves a gaping hole in terms of female representation, not only in the big races but in the weighing room. If Bryony Frost's career is not in decline, she is now based in France, where she is in need of a successor to Frodon.
The announcement also comes shortly after Hayley Turner retired after riding over 1,000 winners on the Flat after becoming pregnant.
Some are coming through the ranks - after all she was knocking around for a while before it all clicked into place. But as much as racing would like there to be, there is not a long queue of women who want to ride over the sticks professionally and those she has inspired to be the next Blackmore are probably no older than early teens.
The one thing we can say with some confidence, it will be a long time before we see another Blackmore. The only decision facing the Jockey Club now is Cheltenham or Aintree for the statue. Or both.

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