PURPLE PATCH: It wasn’t a hard choice this week. We look at the incredible current form of Rachael Blackmore – fresh from her six winners at the Cheltenham Festival.
Rachael Blackmore, aged 31, has been riding out of her skin for the first three months of the year and it’s incredible to think she only rode her first winner 10 years ago.
She’s very much the jockey to follow at the moment as we show in this week’s Purple Patch.
So far, Blackmore has had 130 rides in 2021 and incredibly over a third of those have come in the top three.
She’s ridden 27 winners so far with another 23 horses finishing either second or third and it’s such consistency that has seen her stock rise so quickly and significantly.
Her strike rate of 21% is well above the average and she must think that every horse she gets on has a chance of winning.
Blackmore has already wracked up seven Group 1 winners this year, five of which came at the Cheltenham Festival.
As well as those five Group 1s at Cheltenham, she was also victorious in the Mares’ Novices’ Hurdle aboard Telmesomethinggirl, giving the Irish jockey an incredible six winners at Jump racing’s biggest festival of the year.
Her other five victories came aboard Honeysuckle (Champion Hurdle), Bob Olinger (Ballymore Novices’ Hurdle), Sir Gerhard (Champion Bumper), Allaho (Ryanair Chase) and Quilixios (Triumph Hurdle) and her plethora of winners saw her crowned Top Jockey at this year’s festival.
With a number of high-profile rides still to come, you’d be pretty confident Blackmore will ride considerably more winners and what a way to cap off her amazing season than by winning the Irish Jockeys’ title.
If she can pip Paul Townend to that, then that will be the cherry on the cake.
