Irish Jockey Rachel Blackmore Voted BBC’s World Sport Star Of The Year

Irish jockey Rachael Blackmore has been voted BBC Sports Personality's World Sport Star of the Year for 2021.

The 32-year-old became the first female rider to win the Grand National at Aintree with victory on 11-1 chance Minella Times in April. No other woman had ever finished in the first two of the famous steeplechase.

Blackmore also became the first woman to be leading jockey at the Cheltenham Festival in March, where she racked up six victories.

She said receiving the World Sport Star award was “unbelievable”.

“The support has been incredible. I got such a kick out of being on that list of nominees. This is just incredible,” she added.

“My dreams were so big, but [this year] far surpassed anything I could have ever imagined.

“The reaction has been brilliant, I feel very privileged to have had the year I've had.”

The previous best by a female rider in the National was Katie Walsh's third place finish in 2012. Women were not permitted to ride in the race until 1977, and in total, only 19 female jockeys have competed.

Topping an online public vote, Blackmore beat off competition from Mexican boxer Saul 'Canelo' Alvarez, American football quarterback Tom Brady, Serbia's world number one tennis player Novak Djokovic, Jamaican sprinter Elaine Thompson-Herah, and Dutch Formula 1 world champion Max Verstappen.

The 2020 winner of the award was Russian UFC fighter Khabib Nurmagomedov.

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Rachel Blackmore To Contend For BBC SPOTY World Sport Star Award

The first female jockey to claim the Cheltenham Festival Leading Jockey title, including a Champion Hurdle win aboard Honeysuckle, Rachel Blackmore is the leading fancy for this year's BBC Sports Personality of the Year World Sport Star award. According to the Irish Independent, voting for the award opened on Monday at bbc.com and will close at 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 14.

The award will be presented during the BBC Sports Personality of the Year show live on BBC One on Sunday, Dec. 19.

Also in 2021, Blackmore became the first woman to ride the winner of the iconic Grand National with her success on Minella Times. Prior to Blackmore's win, the closest a female jockey had come to winning the world's most famous steeplechase race was Katie Walsh's third on Seabass in 2012.

In her post-race interview, Blackmore told the world: “I don't feel male or female right now, I don't even feel human. This is just unbelievable.”

Blackmore will be awarded the 2021 Irish Racing Hero Award at the annual Horse Racing Ireland Awards in December.

Other nominees for the 2021 BBC World Sport Star award include: boxing champion Saul 'Canelo' Alvarez, American football's Tom Brady, tennis' Novak Djokovic, five-time Olympic gold medal-winning sprinter Elaine Thompson-Herah, and Formula 1 driver Max Verstappen.

Read more at the Independent.

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Letter to the Editor: Andrea Branchini

My fellow Americans, I put it to you that the 2021 Liverpool Grand National was an epoch-making sporting event –like the sub-4-minute mile of Roger Bannister in 1954 or the first MLB game of Jackie Robinson in 1947.

In the 1944 movie “National Velvet” a very young Elizabeth Taylor faints and slides off her beloved horse Pie after having crossed the finish line first in the Grand National–that mad race where 40 horses and riders are to jump 30 high fences over 4 1/2 miles.

The after-the-finish fall is what screenwriters call a “plot device,” so that Velvet (Taylor) and Pie can be disqualified without an unpractical and probably unfilmable reveal in the winner's enclosure. It is actually an ingenious little stratagem, because it stands to reason and is very credible that a 12-year-old girl could be totally exhausted at the end of a marathon ride that even professional jockeys find challenging.

The actual race lasts close to 10 minutes–an eternity in horseracing. Usually, the public commentary is in fact a relay of different commentators, as it is too big a job for just one voice and one single pair of eyes.

The Grand National has always been a unique legend-making legend. This is no exaggeration. The reasons why are many and would call for a long Power Point in a lecture.

Here is a short sample: the 40 horses' start seems a cavalry charge in Napoleonic times; the betting is hysterical, with the favorite usually at 8-1 or thereabouts; the race begins and ends in a racetrack proper, but most of the action takes place on two circuits over country fields perimetered by single lines of spectators (a bit like an Olympic marathon).

Special characters, portentous stories, incredible anecdotes pour from the history of the race like fresh water from a spring: the amateur of amateurs Duke of Albuquerque (find a better name!), who should have paid regular rent at the nearby hospital; cancer-recovered Bob Champion winning in 1981 and immortalized in another major motion picture; Devon Loch, the mount of Dick Francis (yes, that Dick Francis), that spread her four legs to the ground in a belly-flop when in view of the finish line; riders Marcus Armytage and Hywel Davies leading the race in 1990 and discussing the pace {“Are we going too fast?”); the supposed shiver of unhappiness that horses emit when they understand they have to go for a second lap–and so on, the material is endless.

This is definitely a race for dreamers of all types, an event that is notoriously most loved by individuals who first watched it on TV as little children (this writer included).

Then, on top of all of the above, as if it was not enough, came perfectly-cast Rachael Blackmore from County Tipperary, Ireland, to win a race in which women could not legally ride until the mid-1970s. That is why, in the Hollywood fiction of “National Velvet,” Liz Taylor had to impersonate a male jockey to ride her horse Pie in the race.

Rachael Blackmore is simply so great a jockey that her victories in the field shut everybody up–just like Joan of Arc. “I do not feel male, I do not feel female, I do not even feel human,” Rachael Blackmore said to a journalist while walking her horse to the National winner's enclosure. Those words may read otherwise on the written page, but resounded with the great humility of truth when they were spoken. A racing journalist lived dangerously (“I can feel male jockeys will not want to talk to me anymore”) when he said on TV that Rachael Blackmore's greatest asset is her intelligence. “You cannot pick her out in a race, she is just a great jockey,” said retired professional rider Chris Grant, who was second three times in the Grand National, once agonizingly close.

My fellow Americans, I put it to you that the 2021 Liverpool Grand National was an epoch-making sporting event. And I leave it to you.

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Historic Grand National Win Still Hasn’t Sunk In For Jockey Rachel Blackmore

Rachel Blackmore made history over the weekend as the first female jockey to win the Grand National at Aintree, piloting 11-1 chance Minella Times across the wire first on Saturday. Prior to Blackmore's win, the closest a female jockey had come to winning the world's most famous steeplechase race was Katie Walsh's third on Seabass in 2012.

In her post-race interview, Blackmore told the world: “I don't feel male or female right now, I don't even feel human. This is just unbelievable.”

Blackmore told BBC Sport on Tuesday that the victory still hasn't really sunk in.

“It's been such a whirlwind since it happened,” the jockey said. “I haven't really processed the fact that I have won the Aintree Grand National. I've watched the replay a few times – but it's still just hard to comprehend it all.”

She added that the gender disparity hasn't been a major issue for her in her career as a jockey.

“For me in racing it's been extremely level,” Blackmore told BBC Sport. “I think the achievements of Nina Carberry and Katie Walsh, when I entered the weighing room were so big that the gender thing was never an issue.

“I've just carried that forward. For me personally it's never been an experience I have had in racing in recent times, and that's something that racing should be very proud of.”

Female jockeys were first allowed to enter the Grand National in 1975, when the Sex Discrimination Act was passed. Blackmore is the 20th female jockey to compete in the race.

Read more at BBC Sport.

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