She was positive, but there was no hiding the fact that the very well spoken Sharyn Lancaster, Racing Training Manager at RWWA, below, and speaking on Tab Radio earlier this week, was concerned about finding new riding talent. And well she and the racing industry should be.
Frankly, it’s been an unspoken problem for this particular industry for more than a couple of years.
As has been pointed out by many, it’s a different world today, and when it comes to athletes, those even in their early teens are bigger boned than the generation before, and have more and better career opportunities than getting into horse racing- unless in an executive level with a bulging salary to match.
Those days when serving an apprenticeship, and then trying to be a senior rider seem like something travelling way back to the future with Marty McFly and Doc.
Look at today’s new generation of cricketers, tennis players etc. They’re very very big boys and…girls- and with incredible endurance and stamina.
As for female apprentice riders, this seems to be the best way for racing to keep going, and this most obvious in Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria.
There have been race meetings in places like Pinjarra, Albany, Broome, and other provincial tracks in Western Australia where every race has been won by female riders- very good riders like Lucy Fiore, below, Holly Watson, Victoria Carver, Tash Faithfull…
Victoria, meanwhile, is seeing more and more women riders, where, not that long ago, there were only the Berriman sisters, Kathy O’Hara, Christine Puls, Michelle Payne, below, and a handful of others.
Today? Think about it- and those riders other than the usual suspects.
Queensland’s Angela Jones, below, has arrived from seemingly out of nowhere as have Jaylah Kennedy, Rochelle Milnes, Anna Roper, Margaret Collett, Molly Bourke, Molly Fitzgerald and many others coming through the ranks.
Perhaps not in the Group 1 races, but in the hundreds of other races attracting wagering, the female riders appear to be gaining more and more traction and popular with the betting public to back them confidently with dollars.
Angela Jones, Jaylah Kennedy, Lucy Fiore, Anna Roper and Rochelle Milnes are all popular with those who know that money is money wherever it’s there to be made and when they know they’re on a winner.
Where’s everything heading for horse racing? Who knows.
Not being a racing writer nor involved in the makeup of horse racing, one would think that it’s time to have more female writers covering horse racing as a lifestyle sport plus ladies in executive positions in racing clubs.
It doesn’t take an Einstein to see that horse racing today attracts more younger ladies than younger men, and that here’s an important market segment that needs to have better representation at a racing club level than dealing with a new version of the very old old boys club.
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