Racing history is littered with apparent breakthrough moments that turned out to be as good as it ever got, but two years on from the afternoon at Ascot that made her name, Hollie Doyle can rest assured that Champions Day 2020 was only the start.
Well, not rest, exactly. “It’s weird how your goalposts change,” she said at Leicester racecourse on Tuesday, in the brief gap between her 957th and 958th rides of 2022. “When you’re young, you say: ‘I’ll be satisfied once I’ve ridden out my [apprentice’s] claim’. And once you’ve done that, you think: ‘I’ll be happy when I’ve ridden a Group winner’. But you’re still not happy, you want to ride 10. Your goalposts constantly change, and I think that’s the athlete’s mindset.”
Doyle rode two of the six winners on Champions Day two years ago including her first Group One success thanks to a fine tactical ride on Glen Shiel in the Sprint. Her then boyfriend, now husband, Tom Marquand, also had two wins, which ensured a very happy drive back to their Hungerford home with two-thirds of the riders’ spoils from Britain’s most valuable day at the races.
Doyle has since added four more victories at the highest level to her record, including a Classic – the Prix de Diane, or French Oaks – among three so far in 2022. She is also leading a tight race for second place behind William Buick in the Flat jockeys’ championship, and long odds-on to finish in the top three in the title race – which runs from early May until Champions Day – for the first time.
Although she insists that “we’re both focused on riding big-race winners and we wouldn’t be checking each other’s stats really”, a second-place finish would put her in front of Marquand in the championship for the first time, too. “Wind back 10 years,” she admits. “I never thought I’d be riding more winners than Tom. It’s crazy.”
The old warrior Trueshan, one of Doyle’s Ascot winners in 2020 and again last year in the Champions Long Distance Cup, is the likely favourite to gain a third straight success on Saturday and will remain in training next year along with Nashwa, her French Oaks winner, providing a solid foundation for her search for more Group One success.
The British Flat season will begin to wind down after Saturday’s £4m card, but for Doyle, the best of 2022 may be yet to come. Nashwa is a potential runner at the Breeders’ Cup meeting in Kentucky in early November and shortly after that, she and Marquand will head in the opposite direction to start two-month contracts riding in Japan.
It promises to be a fascinating experience for Doyle in particular, as riding on Japan’s immensely valuable and competitive main circuit is, for the moment at least, an almost exclusively male preserve. The gender balance at the top of Japanese racing resembles that in Britain 20 years ago, before Hayley Turner began to work her way through the ranks.
Brighton
12.55 Master Sully 1.30 Mutaany 2.05 Granary Queen (nb) 2.40 Blue Curacao 3.15 Parikarma 3.50 Aldbourne 4.25 Broxi (nap) 5.00 Handytalk
Carlisle
1.00 Tommy's Oscar 1.35 Good Bye 2.10 Springwell Bay 2.45 Wye Aye 3.20 Bridge Road 3.55 Tico Times 4.30 School Days Over
Chelmsford City
5.25 Costa Adeje 5.55 Creme Chantilly 6.30 Running Lion 7.00 Solitary Trees 7.30 Statu Of Liberty 8.00 Dynamic Talent 8.30 Howth
Nanako Fujita is currently the only senior female rider on the Japan Racing Association circuit, which covers the country’s 10 major tracks. When she took out a licence in 2016, she was the first woman to do so in 16 years. “It’s going to be an experience but I’m not going there for a holiday, I want to try to ride winners and made a good name for myself,” Doyle says.
“If there’s maybe girls that want to ride there, hopefully it might inspire a few others to get into it and maybe change a few mindsets, if there are any trainers like that.
“I suppose everywhere moves at different rates and through natural progression. Luckily in the UK, things have moved pretty rapidly since Hayley Turner and Cathy Gannon and maybe it needs someone like Nanako to kick things open so others follow in her footsteps. But you can’t force something if it’s not there, I don’t know if there are many girls wanting to be jockeys out there, but I’ll find out.”
The celebrity status of successful jockeys in Japan could also be a shock to the system – “I don’t want to be recognised really,” the 26-year-old says, “and I like to keep it that way” – and so too the “Jockey Jail” which keeps riders sequestered away from the internet and their mobiles the night before a meeting.
But there should be serious opportunities to make history too, as no female jockey has ever won at Grade Two level in Japan, never mind in a Grade One. And the experience will surely add a further edge to Doyle’s ability as she attempts to give Buick – and perhaps the returning former champion, Oisin Murphy – a race in the championship next year.
“William’s got the best job in the country [with champion trainer, Charlie Appleby] and it’s going to be a hard gap for anyone to bridge,” she says. “He was out and away early and I don’t think anyone was going to catch him and all credit to him, he’s a top jockey and the ultimate athlete. But I always launch myself into every year and I’d love to win it one day.”
