“I’d put Siobhan up on anything if I had the choice because you know you’re going to get 100% and you know it’s going to be 100% genuine and if there’s a mistake, it’s not for the want of trying, it’s going to be learned from and it’s going to be felt by her, whereas you might not get that all the time with other jockeys.”

John McConnell in The Big Interview, August 2021

NEXT month it will be four years since Siobhan Rutledge rode her very first winner on the track. In a 10-furlong apprentice handicap, she guided the mercurial Magi Gal to an on-the-nod win and everything changed in her mindset after that.

Before that, she was just an 18-year-old getting a few rides on the here and there. The dream was there but the self belief and resilience were lacking, and naturally she wondered if this vocation was for her.

Now she was a winning jockey, now she had that feeling of success and now she had the evidence to prove to herself that she could do it.

John McConnell always had belief in her, having taken her on in 2017 when she was fresh out of the RACE Academy. He suggested she sign on as an apprentice, watched races back with her, encouraged her to keep going always.

Six years on, her role at the ever progressive Rockview Stables base has developed into an integral one, so much so that McConnell said in that very interview that if he was away from the yard for a length of time, he’d have no problem leaving her to run his operation of over 100 horses.

Gradual

On the track, her career has got going as well but she will tell you herself her success has been gradual and sometimes not as progressive as she’d like it to be, and she remains her own harshest critic. The strive is to improve, work harder, win more.

Rutledge rode 11 winners in early 2020 and had real momentum before the pandemic halted everything. When racing resumed, she had to develop her reputation again but she did just that in 2021 when she rode 24 winners.

Last season, she was disappointed with a final tally of 12 winners, but credit to her, she has bounced back again and has already reached that tally this year, with plenty more opportunities to come, not least a potentially blossoming relationship with the Jessica Harrington team, having ridden a winner on her very first ride for that operation on Starry Heavens in the valuable Connacht Oaks last week.

“I’m happy enough with my strike rate,” she says, reflecting on her 2023 thus far. “Obviously, you always want more opportunities to ride in more races but I feel like I am riding consistently. I just hope now I can stay going because I’ve lost my 5lb claim and it’s always a worry that things will quieten down, but they seem to be going okay.

“I try and ride for as many trainers as I can. John has obviously been a great support. I ride a good bit of work for Harry Rogers and Ross O’Sullivan, and now I’m going into Jessica Harrington’s one day a week and that has been a big help.

“At the start of the season, I knew I wanted to go to a yard with plenty of flat horses and somewhere I could learn a bit more. I rang Kate (Harrington) and asked if they’d have me and thankfully she said she would. It’s great to be riding some lovely two-year-olds and some very nice older horses but also you have Shane Foley there as well and you can learn plenty from him.

“It was brilliant to win on Starry Heavens. I was just grateful to get the ride to be honest, and pleasantly surprised, actually. Shane helped me a lot before the race, and everything just worked out for her. I was delighted to be able to repay the faith shown in me.”

While John McConnell has been instrumental in the career of Rutledge, the origins of her success came from her father Ger, who very sadly passed away when she was just nine.

He rode in point-to-points and trained horses at their family home. While his passing came too soon, he left Siobhan and her twin brother Gerry with a love of horses and in the case of the former, a real desire to forge a career in racing.

“Dad always had us around horses,” she says thoughtfully. “Myself and Gerry would always go racing with him and he’d often sit us up on horses, let us ride them around the field, have us helping him, doing jobs and we loved that.

“I started taking riding lessons and things just progressed from there. Gerry has ridden in a few bumpers and point-to-points and he’s an apprentice farrier now, so it’s all kind of intertwined and you could say racing runs deep in the family now.

“When Dad passed away, we had to lose all the horses at home, but if anything, it made me really determined to get into racing. I think that’s a natural thing, as in when you lose anybody in your life, you try to find a way to feel close to them. That was just the way for me when I was growing up and even now, to remember him and feel close to him.

“He and his best friend Ger Farrell, they rode together and used to get up to all sorts with horses. Ger is a good friend of the family now and I meet him often and he’d be telling me all the stories of what they used to get up to. It just makes you want to do similar things.”

No doubt her dad would have approved of the ride she gave Starry Heavens at Sligo. After missing the break, she didn’t rush the filly up, instead sat in, took her time and didn’t move her to the outside until they straightened up in the last furlong and a half, to a strip of ground she felt was riding a little quicker if anything. The Harrington filly duly rattled home to win readily.

“I am generally a positive person, I think you have to be in racing, you have to have the glass half full,” Rutledge says. “But the people that are close to me will know that I am quite hard on myself in lots of ways and that is something that I am working on.

“When I first started, John would sit down with me a lot and watch races back. I think you need someone that’ll be tough on you in terms of telling you how it is, and what you need to improve. Everyone can say well done when you ride a winner but not everyone wants to sit down with you when things have gone wrong and suggest how you can improve.

“I suppose I probably have taken that forward myself now. Even if I win a race and everything went to plan, I’d be watching it back thinking, I should have done this differently, or if I didn’t win, thinking I should have done this or done that, just in that sense, criticizing myself.

“In a way it helps me to improve also, so it’s not all bad, but I’m definitely more conscious now of recognising when you have a good day.”

Refinement

A huge amount of Rutledge’s work off the track involves the refinement of her riding style and her own physique. Most jockeys are aiming to move the scales downwards but given her smaller stature, she has spent a large part of her career with the room to put on weight by developing muscle.

That is both an advantage and a disadvantage.

“When you’re learning to ride racehorses, you’re trying to slow them down, trying to settle them,” she explains. “When I was in RACE, I was so light, probably 6st 10lb, and everything was running away with me.

“Sean Davis was in my year. He went on to be very successful as a jockey. He was probably the same weight as me when we were in RACE and I just couldn’t understand how he could hold horses that I couldn’t so I started looking at him, trying to mimic the style and I suppose I kept that through to my career.

“I feel I need to look at people who are the same weight and have the same structure as me if I want to ride that way. I don’t think I’ll be able to look like Oisín Murphy because I don’t look like Oisín Murphy.

“Obviously I’m a bit shorter and a bit smaller, so I’d be watching the likes of Hollie Doyle and Andrea Atzeni, the way in which they might ride a finish, I’d be able to mimic that easier than someone who’s taller.”

She is not the first, but it’s undeniable that Rutledge, as a woman, is breaking a mould in Irish flat racing. Joanna Morgan and Cathy Gannon were trailblazers, but since the latter, bar Ana O’Brien, who talented as she was had an undeniably distinct advantage by riding for her father Aidan, Siobhan is the only female rider since Amy Parsons (2007) to hit double figures in the Irish flat jockeys’ championship.

Prejudice

The suggestion of a prejudice always seem to be there but Rutledge, through her own experiences, feels somewhat indifferent about the matter.

“I suppose the way I feel about it now is that if you’re good enough and you put the work in, someone will recognise you and give you opportunities,” she says. “If you’re good enough you’ll make it.

“It’s so competitive for every young apprentice, boys and girls. Obviously there’s always going to be someone who is old fashioned and who might have stipulations about that sort of stuff but it’s important that you work hard and overcome that. Personally I’ve received great opportunities. I’m thankful for all of them. I think we’re moving in the right direction.

“It’s not something I like really talking about. I think the more we talk about it the more we make it an issue whereas it should be just jockeys. It’s hard to explain but I feel like if you don’t talk about it, you’re not bringing awareness to it and maybe that helps with equality, to be just known as a jockey, not male or female.

“I always think of Rachael’s quote after she won the Grand National - ‘I don’t feel male or female right now, I don’t even feel human.’ That was a great line.

“Rachael would be a big help to me, very supportive and always on the other line. I suppose I can relate to her in some ways, just that we’re both young females in the sport and that. Some of the things that maybe I’d be going through early on or even now, she’s seen it all. It’s nice to have that - someone to talk to on the phone or at the races, if we’re riding on the same card.”

Rutledge has 29 winners left on her claim and so becoming a fully fledged professional is now very much a goal. If she achieved that feat, she would join the aforementioned groundbreakers Joanna Morgan and Cathy Gannon as the only female flat riders to have ridden out their claim and thus become professional in Ireland.

“I used to make these really big unattainable goals which would usually end up leaving me disappointed, but I’m 29 winners off riding out my claim, and I am a professional after that, which is something I could never have imagined but I feel like it’s in reach at this stage, and that’s amazing,” she says.

“I love working with horses, I love the people that work in racing - I think we’re a different breed of people. Being a jockey has allowed me to make a lot of new relationships and I love that as well.

“Long may it continue.”